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'       The  foregoing  Regulations  will  be  strictly  enforced.'  i    l 


THE 


HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 


By    SARAH    TYTLER, 


AUTHOR   OF       CITOVSNNE   JACQUELINE,"  ETC. 


NEW    YORK: 

HARPER  &  BROTHERS,  PUBLISHERS, 

1    R   UKLIN     SQU  A 
1868. 


J 


TO 

E  L  S  P  E  T  H, 

OF    WHOM    HER    FRIENDS    MUST   THINK, 

BECAUSE     SHE     DOES     NOT 

THINK  OF   HERSELF, 

IN   AFFECTIONATE   ACNOW  L  ED  G  M  E  NT 

OF  ALL  HER  CARE  AND  KINDNESS 

AND  PURE  SYMPATHY. 


THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 


CHAPTER  I. 

GKA.ND'MERE  DUPUT's  OPINION  OF  THE  ENGLISH. 

"  Yolande,  my  child,  we  must  make  friends  with  the  peo- 
ple about  us.  I  am  desolate  here  without  my  children, 
my  poor,  who  used  to  come  to  the  chatelet  and  suffer  them- 
selves to  be  served  on  Saturday." 

"  If  you  are  desolate,  grand'niere,  what  are  we  ?  Why, 
you  always  remind  me  of  the  singing-birds  which  abound 
in  this  England,  one  of  the  few  good  things  Ave  have  come 
so  far  to  find." 

There  is  nothing  common  and  unclean,  my  impatient 
grand-daughter;  you  ought  to  know  better.  'Patient  as 
a  Huguenot'  is  a  proverb,  and  all  is  fair  to  those  who  have 
the  eyes  to  see  it.  As  to  the  singing,  I  learned  earlier 
than  any  of  you  to  sing  in  a  cage,  and  to  what  music!" 

"  I  know,  grand'mere.  It  was  to  the  sound  of  threats 
and  curses,  and  the  volleys  of  the  dragonnades.  Yon  \\  ere 
one  of  the  children  imprisoned  and  tormented  in  order  to 
turn  you  from  the  faith,  which  you  kept,  good  grand'm 
because  'out  of  the  mouths  of  babes  and  sucklings  God 
has  perfected  praise.' " 

"Ah!  the  babes  and  sucklings  know  Little  hettcr  what 
they  are  saying,  and  have  no  more  merit  of  will  and  choice 
than  the  Innocents.  When  they  have  will  and  choice, 
how  they  falter  and  fall  away, because  the  flesh  is  weak." 

"But,  grand'mere,  I  do  not  know,  ami  perhaps  it  is  au- 
dacious to  say  it,  but  it  seems  to  me  the  hot  persecution 
which  lasted  but  a  moment,  because  no  living  creatures, 


6  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

in  their  nature,  could  endure  it  longer,  was  not  so  much 
harder  to  bear  than  life — long  exile  and  isolation  among 
strangers  and  foreigners  who  hate  us  and  slander  us, 
grand'mere." 

"  They  do  not  all  hate  us,  little  one,  though  their  Defoe 
has  written 

'  Two  hundred  thousand  pairs  of  wooden  shoes, 
Who,  God  be  thank'd,  had  nothing  left  to  lose ;' 

and  'no  longer  strangers  and  foreigners,'  was  once  writ- 
ten to  men  more  hunted  and  despised  than  we  or  our  fa- 
thers have  been.  'All  things  are  easy,'  but  troubles  are  best 
not  talked  of,  at  least  they  are  talked  of  enough  by  your 
mother,  who  did  not  live  near  enough  to  the  worst  of 
them  to  feel  that  they  could  not  really  hurt — just  as  we 
shall  feel  death  can  not  hurt  us  one  day,  though  it  has 
been  our  bete  noire  all  our  lives.  Just  so  are  troubles 
when  we  look  back  and  count  what  they  have  cost  with- 
out experiencing  the  blessing  and  the  joy  of  the  persecu- 
ted. In  the  same  way  you  would  grudge  to  be  still  pay- 
ing by  instalments  the  price  of  my  wedding-gown,  of 
which  you  never  saw  the  beauty,  and  which  was  unpick- 
ed, and  cut  down,  and  made  anew  into  a  mantle  for  my 
son  Hubert,  forty  years  before  you  were  born.  But  you 
have  not  the  excuse  of  your  mother,  Yolande  ;  you  never 
saw  the  sun  of  France,  nor  worshiped  in  a  Temple,  under 
a  pastor  of  your  own  people — a  sufferer  like  yourself 
among  fellow-sufferers ;  nor  did  you  ever  go  a-marketing 
in  the  old  Place,  or  pull  great  gourds,  red  and  yellow  like 
the  sunset,  or  gather  caper  blossom,  scented  with  vanille. 
You  have  nothing  to  complain  of;  you  are  English-born, 
and  can  speak  the  English  tongue  like  a  native  j  you  are 
a  true  Englishwoman." 

"  Never,  grand'mere,  I  would  rather  be — Catholic." 
"  Hush !  I  shall  tell  you  what  you  are — a  French  Jew. 
All  the  nationalities  which  think  themselves  better  than 
the  other  nationalities  are  Jewish,  and  all  the  Churches 
which  think  themselves  better  than  the  other  Churches 
are  Jewish.  But  at  the  same  time  I  beg  the  pardon  of 
the  poor  Jews  for  the  comparison.  They  had  reason  for 
their  exclusiveness,  while  the  French  and  the  English, 
Roman  Catholic  or  Reformed,  have  none,  and  even  profess 


THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  7 

to  have  none.     For  me,  I  love  France ;  I  do  not  say  how 
I  love  France :  I  think  of  her  every  day;  dream  of  her 
every  night,  till  I  am  tempted  to  be  an  idolatress,  and  to 
imagine   that   Heaven   will  he  like   the   native  country. 
And,  indeed,  so  it  will  be  in  one  sense,  Yolande,  for  it  is 
the  Father's  house.     The  French  know  what  that  means 
to  a  marvel,  though  one  has  told  me  that  it  is  used  as  a 
reproach  against  them,  that  they  have  no  turn  of  phrase 
save  '  with  myself,'  or  '  my  household,'  for  what  the  En- 
glish call  '  sweet  home.'     The  French  have  the  Father's 
house,  at  least.     But  as  for  me,  I  am  charmed  with  En- 
gland— it  is  so  like  Holland,  and  is  so  cool  and  fresh  in  this 
bit  of  meadow  land.     "With  the  English  rudeness  and  truth 
also,  which  reminds  me  of  the  prickly  bosquets  of  roses  I 
once  reared  in  my  garden,  where  M.  Claude  had  walked. 
These  English  have  had  their  own  way  ever  since  they 
killed  their  king,  which  was  very  wicked — indeed,  quite 
profane.      The  French  have  done   nothing   of  the  kind, 
though  the  unhappy  Charles,  misled  by  his  mother  and  his 
brother,  aud  by  Guise  and  Lorraine,  fired  from  the  Louvre 
on  his  people  on  that  night  of  despair,  when  our  Coligni, 
a  very  lion  at  bay,  was  slam ;  and  our  Henry  of  Navarre 
— Jeanne  d'Albret's  brave  boy — was  held  a  prisoner.     The 
'  religion'  in  its  professors  has  always  regarded  it  as  one 
of  the  most   cruel  and   calumnious  accusations   brought 
against '  the  faithful'  that  they  were  not  loyal.     It  is  only 
madmen'  and  assassins,  like  Clement  and  Ravaillac,  who 
would  slay  the  Lord's  anointed.     But  from  that  day  to 
this  the  English  have  had  their  own  way;  and  have  they 
abused  it?     No.     They   have  had  a  few  thousands  of 
bread-rioters,  breakers  of  our  French  machinery,  and  burn- 
ers of  the  houses  of  Catholics,  it  is  true  ;  but  there  will 
always  be  doubtful  characters  in  every  class  and  nation. 
The  brave,  patient  people  have  been  quiet  and  tolerant, 
just  and  merciful.     The  English  have  been  masters  in 
their  parliaments  and  on  their  battle-fields,  since  the  man 
of  the  people,  Oliver — not  the  barber,  Yolande,  the  Imvm  er, 
and  oh!  such  another  brewer,  a  hero  who  spoke  brave 
words,  mighty  words  for  the  oppressed  Vaudois,  our  breth- 
ren in  Piedmont,  and  behold  the  honor !     The  English  have 
kept  their  heads.     They  have  nol   been  gasconaders,  or 
tyrants  of  the  canaille,  undoing  themselves  ami   others. 


8  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

I  believe  that  in  their  noble,  savage  way  they  have  given 
God  the  glory.  I  esteem,  I  honor,  I  salute  the  English, 
not  only  for  the  shelter  they  afford  us,  poor  driven  dust 
of  emigrants,  but  for  the  example  they  present  of  possess- 
ing their  own  big  souls  in  patience." 

"  Well,  grand'mere,  I  wish  they  returned  the  compli- 
ment. I  can  not  see,  for  my  part,  that  the  admiration  and 
the  friendship  should  all  be  on  one  side." 

"  Ah !  then  you  do  not  see  the  well-spring  of  Christian 
life  which  burst  from  the  broken  heart  of  the  Divine 
Founder.  But  this  monopoly  you  speak  of,  as  one  would 
of  the  salt-tax  in  France,  is  what  I  began  our  conversation 
by  scolding  about.  I  don't  want  to  limit  the  love  of  one's 
neighbor  to  me  and  my  house.  Not  at  all.  I  want  to 
have  it  everywhere,  like  the  good  air  we  breathe ;  but  I 
must  show  my  good-will  in  order  to  win  a  sight  of  anoth- 
er's good-will.  I  believe  it  is  present  even  throughout  the 
universe,  north  and  south,  east  and  west,  among  great  mul- 
titudes of  every  kindred  and  tongue  and  nation,  only  it  is 
hidden  from  us ;  and  we  traverse  each  the  other's  streets, 
and  rub  each  the  other's  clothes,  not  knowing  each  other 
— bah ! — but  elbowing  each  other  and  knitting  our  brows 
at  each  other.  Now,  I  desire  that  we  should  know  each 
other  better  here  at  Sedge  Pond.  We  came  here  before 
the  buds  were  on  the  trees;  at  present  they  are  in  full  leaf, 
and  I  have  not  yet  made  a  friend  of  a  living  creature  in 
the  place,  save  the  birds,  the  cats,  and  the  dogs.  I  shall 
pass  over  the  sheep,  the  oxen,  and  the  horses,  and  go  on  at 
once  to  the  poor,  my  children,  at  Toulouse,  whom  I  have 
missed  more  than  the  green  leaves,  and  the  warbling,  purr- 
ing, barking  voices  of  friends  in  London.  No;  London  is 
not  a  modern  Babylon,  as  your  mother  calls  it,  it  is  a  great 
Christian  city,  full  of  violence  and  excess  and  selfish  lux- 
ury, but  also  alive  with  brave  battlings  for  truth  and  jus- 
tice and  noble  wants,  like  our  own  Paris.  It  may  be  roll- 
ed in  blood  and  bathed  in  fire,  but  it  is  no  more  Babylon 
than  the  Lord's  Gospel  is  the  law  of  Moses.  Our  Paris 
and  this  London  can  not  perish  and  be  given  over  to  ob- 
scene beasts.;  because  they  are  redeemed  with  a  price — in 
Christ  first,  and  then  in  all  their  righteous  men,  sublime 
martyrs,  and  returned  prodigals,  in  every  century,  follow- 
ing afar  oif,  after  Him,  in  endless  conqueror's  procession. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  9 

The  Christian  cities  will  corne  out  pure  as  the  gold,  glad 
as  the  light  in  their  day  But  the  question  with  us  just 
now  is,  not  of  great  London,  but  of  little  Sedge  Pond;  and 
the  little  one  is  not  to  he  despised,  since  it  may  need  us 
the  most.  I  shall  set  about  learning  to  know  the  people, 
or  rather,  for  I  natter  myself  I  know  them  a  little  already, 
teaching  the  people  to  know  me,  Grand' mere  Dupuy,  of 
the  Shottery  Cottage,  countrywoman  and  sister  of  good 
Vincent  de  Paul,  though  he  acknowledge  me  not ;  and  I 
command  you  to  help  me,  Yolande." 

The  speaker  was  a  little  old  woman,  dressed  in  a  Lyons 
silk  gown,  with  the  skirt  drawn  through  the  pocket  holes. 
She   wore   a  mob   cap   of  fine   lace,  had  mittens   on  her 
hands,  and  her  neckerchief  was  fastened  by  a  silver  dove 
instead  of  a  cross.     She  was  at  that  moment  resting  on  a 
staff,  with  a  carved  coral  head,  representing  another  little 
old  woman  in  scarlet.     Her  rustling  silk,  her  cobweb  lace, 
her  foreign  accent,  and  her  lovely  old  face   might  have 
clearly  told  the  on-looker  that  she  belonged  to  the  latter 
part  of  the  last  century,  and  to  that  country  which  owns 
at  once  the  loveliest  and  the  ugliest  old  women.     The  ac- 
cessories, too,  suited  the  main  figure.     The  room  had  an 
air  of  quiet,  but  was  not  without  its  ornaments.     There 
was  an  elaborately  decorated  and  festooned  bed  in  one 
corner ;  a  curtain  hung  before  the  door ;  a  wood-fire  was 
on  the  hearth  ;  and  there  were  on  the  walls  a  few  foreign 
prints,  mostly  of  gaunt,  care-worn  men,  in  Geneva  gowns 
and  skull-caps.     Her  companion  Avas  a  tall,  slender  girl  of 
sixteen,  in  as  rustling  a  silk  gown  and  as  heavy  a  quilted 
petticoat  as  the  old  lady's.     She  had  a  little  cap  on  her 
head,  which  surmounted  a  roll  of  black-brown  hair.     The 
girl's  face  was  prematurely  womanly,  and  delicately  cut, 
bearing  a  resemblance  to  her  relative's,  though  with  less 
color,  and  more  shaded  and  sharp  than  the  old  woman's 
could  ever  have  been ;  but  it  Avas  a  sort  of  paraphrase  of 
the  old  Avoman's  beauty,  sicklied  over,  hollowed,  and  worn 
betimes",  by  the  fact  of  its  having  blossomed  in  the  shade, 
carrying,  before    it    Avas   able    to    carry    it,  a    burden    of 
thought.     The  big  eyes  had  taken  a  grave,  far-withdrawn, 
unfathomable  look,£rom  their  striving  to  read  the  enigma 
of  a  sinning,  suffering  world,  without  their  owners  having 
got  the  key  of  faith,  or  while   the   key,  still  but    a  was 

A  2 


10      '  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

model,  took,  but  did  not  retain,  the  shape  of  any  obstacle 
to  which  it  was  applied,  in  place  of  combating  and  over- 
coming it. 


CHAPTER  rr. 

grand'meee  dupuy's  attempt  to  make  friends  with 
the  people  about  hek. 

Grand'meee  Dupuy  was  a  resolute,  enthusiastic  old 
woman,  and  was  no  cipher,  but  a  ruling  spirit,  though  it 
must  be  understood  that  she  ruled  with  the  old  meta- 
phorical ivory  wand,  draped  in  myrtle,  in  the  house  of 
her  married,  middle-aged  emigrant  son.  Accordingly, 
that  very  afternoon,  as  she  had  said,  she  set  about  begin- 
ning her  attack  upon  what  she  had  found  the  locked  and 
padlocked  fortresses  of  Britons'  hearts  at  Sedge  Pond. 

With  innocent  wile  and  womanly  tact  she  said  to  Yo- 
lande — 

"These  honest  villagers  hunger,  though  they  do  not 
starve,  as  they  did  in  poor  France  after  its  bloody  wars 
and  ghastlier  splendors.  Yes,  these  Sedge  Pond  folk  want 
in  the  midst  of  plenty.  They  live,  like  the  hogs,  on  sodden 
bread,  raw  meat,  and  vegetables.  They  have  the  dys- 
pepsia or  the  spleen.  See  how  purple  and  tallow-faced 
they  are  ;  hear  of  their  surfeits,  their  fevers,  their  wastes, 
their  pinings.  They  really  know  nothing  of  their  own 
word  '  comfort,'  save  in  connection  with  swilling  and 
smoking  in  the  ale-house.  That  is  not  even  a  resting- 
place  for  travelers,  as  with  us — only  a  rendezvous  for  the 
natives.  When  we  are  merry,  it  is  under  the  walnut  and 
olive-trees,  in  the  games.  It  may  be  giddiness  and  light- 
mindedness,  as  your  mother  says  :  but  it  is  not  riot.  But 
when  they  are  merry,  it  is  in  the  ale-house — always  the 
ale-house.  Even  when  they  have  the  fair,  what  is  it  but 
the  whole  streets  filled,  the  stalls  surrounded,  the  caravans 
visited  by  the  customers  of  the  ale-house  ?  The  marriage- 
guests  are  borrowed  from  the  ale-house ;  their  harvest- 
feasts  are  kept  in  the  ale-house,  or  are  versions  of  the  ale- 
house feasts  in  granaries  and  barns.  Fie !  I  believe  their 
magistrates  sit,  their  choristers  practice,  their  clerks,  per- 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  11 

haps  even  their  ministers,  relax  themselves  from  their 
cock-fighting  and  their  execution  of  highwaymen  in  the 
ale-house.  In  one  word,  comfort  and  amusement  for  the 
peasants  of  England  mean — the  ale-house.  My  child,  the 
stomach  has  something  to  do  with  that ;  the  cooking,  the 
housekeeping  at  least,  may  be  improved.  I  don't  say  that 
we  have  not  a  great  deal  to  learn  ourselves,  above  all  a 
marmot,  a  flower  of  the  cabbage  like  you,  Yolande ;  but 
we  will  remember  that  wherever  the  French  have  settled 
the  leprosy  and  the  scurvy  have  disappeared.  We  Avill 
let  the  poor  people  taste  our  savory  pot-d-feu,  our  cool 
goUter  of  the  sliced  artichoke  or  the  cucumber,  our  warm 
ragoiU  of  the  cutlets  or  the  kidneys,  our  bland  almond 
milk  and  our  sweet  succory  water.  I  wager  they  never 
tasted  any  thing  so  nice,  and  will  not  care  for  the  harsh 
heady  yeast  after  it.  They  will  turn  their  backs  on  the 
ale-house  and  its  commodities.  We  will,  go  to-day  to 
Goody  Gubbins;  she  is  an  incurable,  and  has  only  the 
parish  for  her  relations.  I  have  seen  the  pastor's  servants 
carrying  her  greasy  messes  and  niuddy  slops,  just  a  little 
better  than  the  evei'Listing  beans  and  bacon  and  hunches 
of  bread  and  cheese  of  the  ale-house.  "Who  knows  but, 
if  the  good  God  will  bless  the  deed,  we  may  work  a  Re- 
formed miracle,  and  heal  the  sick  ?" 

Madame  Dupuy's  intentions  were  excellent  and  kindly, 
though  a  little  short-sighted  and  halting,  as  the  most  ex- 
cellent intentions  of  fallible  mortals  are  apt  to  be.  But 
she  did  not  let  the  gi'ass  grow  beneath  her  ancient,  trip- 
ping, high-heeled,  silver-buckled  feet  in  executing  them. 
She  had  her  own  cooking  apparatus  and  her  own' stores: 
ingenious  though  economical  the  one,  and  of  an  ample, 
skillful  range  the  other.  She  was  never  without  her  sim- 
mering pot-d-feit,  the  materials  for  her  summer  or  winter 
gor&ter,  or  the  glass  in  which  her  pebbles  of  sugar  were 
dissolving  and  sinking  in  a  thick,  luscious  syrup  to  the 
bottom  of  the  clear  spring  water.  »She  had  her  pipkins, 
her  ewers,  her  trays — plain  enough,  for  she  had  come  from 
among  a  people  who  were  so  stanch  that  not  more  than 
a  third  of  their  number  had  succumbed  in  creed  to  a 
lengthened  era  of  fines,  penalties,  imprisonments,  and  law- 
suits, which  had  converted  their  silver  bo  copper,  and  their 
porcelain  to  earthenware.     But  all  the  utensils  were  dia- 


12  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

tinguisliecl  by  clever  fitness  for  their  end,  by  neatness  of 
form  and  gayety  of  tone,  and  when  the  austerity  into  which 
the  Himuenot  Church  has  been  driven  did  not  forbid  it, 
even  by  an  elegant  simplicity  of  design.  Nor  did  it  de- 
tract much  from  the  elegant  simplicity  of  Grand'mere  Du- 
puy's  accompaniments  that  in  practice  she  wore  silk  and 
lace,  or  that  in  principle  she  was  a  Huguenot  and  bour- 
geoise.  M.  Dupuy  had  been  and  was  still  connected  in 
trade  with  silk  manufactures ;  and  no  one,  with  any  pre- 
tensions to  the  position  of  a  gentlewoman,  dressed  in  other 
materials  at  that  date.  On  close  inspection  it  might  have 
been  seen  that  the  silk  had  been  very  artistically  scoured, 
and  the  lace  very  artistically  darned.  And  on  minor  mat- 
ters again,  Madame  Dupuy  was  more  of  a  French  woman, 
and  still  more  of  a  human  being,  than  any  thing  else. 

After  dinner  Grand'mere  Dupuy  set  out  from  the  Shot- 
tery  Cottage  with  Yolande,  who  carried  the  pot-ci-feu  in  a 
pipkin  moulded  from  a  gourd,  with  a  gourd  leaf  and  stalk 
for  the  handle,  and  carried  it  very  much  as  another  girl 
would  have  carried  a  basket  of  roses,  or  a  casket  of  jewels ; 
but  still  sombrely,  distrustfully,  reluctantly,  for  all  her 
air.  Grand'mere  walked  slowly  beside  her  Avith  her  coral- 
headed  staff,  eagerly  recounting,  as  she  went,  how  she  had 
always  taken  it  with  her  when  she  went  to  visit  her  sick 
at  Toulouse,  until  the  peasants  hailed  it,  made  much  of  it, 
named  it  the  little  red  madame,  Madame  Rougeole. 

The  village  of  Sedge  Pond  at  any  period  in  the  eight- 
eenth century  was  by  no  means  a  model  village.  It  was 
situated  between  London  and  Norwich.  All  was  misty, 
flat,  and  monotonous  about  it ;  but  there  was  the  perfec- 
tion of  verdure  in  marsh  and  meadow,  broken  only  by 
patches  of  yellow-bearded  corn  and  red-flowered  clover. 
There  was  a  sleepy,  lulling  motion  in  the  slow  river,  with 
its  clumsy  barges,"  and  there  was  breadth  in  the  blue  dis- 
tance. The  roads,  both  high-road  and  by-road,  were  heav- 
ily rutted  in  their  yellow  soil ;  the  lowlands  were  liable 
to  be  flooded  at  particular  seasons  by  the  sluggish,  stag- 
nant brown  water.  There  were  rough,  bristling,  purple 
and  olive-colored  bits  of"  wl'taste"  to  take  in  everywhere. 
There  was  a  castle — a  mass  of  pretentious  white  masonry, 
which  had  replaced  a  more  picturesque,  weather-stained, 
crumbling  tower,  partly  seen  among  the  woods  which  rose 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  13 

above  the  Dupuys'  cottage  ;  and  there  was  a  rectory  like 
a  chateau  itself,  steep-roofed,  gabled,  and  pinnacled,  and 
with  pleasure-grounds,  and  a  wilderness.     This  latter  had 
the  advantage  of  a  constant  tenant  and  a  numerous,  flour- 
ishing household.     There  was  not  another  good  house  in 
the  village,  saving  Shottery  Cottage,  which' was  a  remote 
appendage  of  the  castle,  and  the  ale-house,  which  was  a 
place  of  public  entertainment,  and  not  of  private  conve- 
nience.    The   other   houses   stood  in  irregular  rows  and 
groups,  and  were  dropsical,  bulged-out,  discolored  Gottag<  s, 
covered   with  thatch,  and  in  every  stage   of  rottenness. 
For  that  matter  they  were  much  indebted  to  the  house- 
leek,  and  here  and  there  to  a  side  growth  of  ivy,  for  hold- 
ing them  together;  for  nature  was  trying  hard  to  em- 
broider them  over  with  some  of  her  own  leaf  and  flower- 
work — wonderfully  good  embroidery,  which  makes  men 
forget  the  ruin  in  rapture  at  the  tracery  over  it.     There 
were  no  spouts  above,  nor  gutters  below   the  cottages, 
nothing  to  protect  them  from  the  prevailing  wet  except 
narrow  stone  ledges,  like  eyelids  without  eyelashes,  placed 
above  the  never-opened  windows,  filled  with  small,  thick, 
diamond  shaped   panes   of  glass,  where    they    were    not 
broken  and  boarded  up,  or  stuffed  with  straw,  grass,  wool, 
or  any  thing  which  had  at  the  moment  come  to  hand. 
Beyond  these  ledges  the  moisture  dripped,  soaked,  gath- 
ered, and  grew  green-coated.     The  common  was  a  pud- 
dle,  the  wells  were  one  or  two  open  draw-wells,  and  before 
each  door  there  was  a  heap  of  fermenting,  festering  refuse. 
Any  gardens  belonging  to  the  cottagesVere  like  the  vil- 
lagers in  this  respect,  that  their  good  qualities  were  out 
of  sight.     They  lay  in  diminutive  shaggy  plots  of  pota- 
toes, turnips,  herbs,  with  occasionally  a  straggling,  neg- 
lected, and   misused  flower,  hidden  behind  the    houses. 
Indeed,  had  it  not  been  for  the  quiet,  home-like  landscape, 
with  its  corn-fields  in  their  cool  fresh  green,  ripening  and 
whitening  in  strips  and  nooks  among  the  pasture,  and  the 
castle   park  thrusting  forward  and  separating  the   more 
rural  scene  with  a  woodland  bluff  or  shoulder,  dark  with 
tufts  of  chestnuts,  oaks,  and   plane-trees,   the  village   of 
Sedge  Pond  would  have  been   as  uncomely  a  village  as 
ever  housed  refugees,  and   bred   and  fostered  small-pox, 
purple  fever,  and  ague. 


14  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

The  church  was  half  a  mile  distant  from  the  village, 
which  was  thus  out  of  the  comfortable  sight  of  its  spire, 
and  of  every  thing  but  the  faint  sound  of  its  hoarse  bell,  al- 
though it  was  easily  reached,  down  a  short  lane  commu- 
nicating by  a  private  gate,  about  midway  up  the  castle 
avenue.  The  little  church-yard,  in  one  visitation  of  the 
plague,  had  become  full  to  the  brim,  and  the  oppressed 
earth — crammed  not  by  means  of  coffins,  but  by  trenches 
— had  been  forced  up  breast  high  with  the  wall,  and  was 
left  behind,  to  add  its  quota  to  the  other  disease-distilling 
influences  of  Sed^e  Pond. 

In  some  eyes  the  ale-house  atoned  for  all  defects  and 
drawbacks.  It  was  a  low,  wide,  octagonal  building,  of 
mellow  red  brick,  with  stone  coping,  and  containing  sev- 
eral  large,  low-browed,  brown  rooms,  with  long  tables, 
wattled  seats  and  benches,  and  in  which  there  were  fires 
at  every  season,  smouldering  like  carbuncles,  or  roaring 
and  blazing  like  furnaces.  These  were  the  chosen  retreats 
from  the  skittle-ground,  the  bowling-green,  and  the  court 
where  the  mains  between  the  game-cocks  were  fought  on 
each  side  of  the  whitewashed  porch.  All  the  revelry  and 
debauchery  of  the  neigborhood  went  on  there  ;  and  revelry 
and  debauchery  were  so  much  the  gross  habit  of  the  day, 
that  the  place  set  apart  for  them  was  not  viewed  with  any 
suspicion,  but  was  actually  invested  with  an  influence  and 
respectability  which  absolved  it  from  the  necessity  of  be- 
coming the  "  Castle  Arms,"  or  seeking  such  patronage  as 
any  tavern,  inn,  or  hostelry  in  the  kingdom  would  now  do. 
If  one  takes  into  account,  in  addition,  the  white  foam  of 
tankards,  the  light  curling  blue  vapor  of  pipes,  the  cribbage- 
boards,  the  soiled  news-letters  for  those  who  desired  other 
stimulants  and  more  intellectual  influences,  together  with 
the  social  intercourse,  and  occasionally  the  larger  gather- 
ings of  a  more  festive  character,  where  there  was  a  mix- 
ture of  sexes,  it  is  possible  to  understand  how  to  the  hob- 
nailed, red-cloaked  peasants  of  Sedge  Pond,  comfort  and 
amusement  meant  the  ale-house.  What  Grand'mere  Du- 
puy  had  therefore  to  contend  with,  when  she  proposed  to 
supersede  their  staple  good,  with  its  black  shadow  of  bru- 
tality and  crime,  was  something  which  would  sorely  task 
her  light,  subtle  French  substitutes,  unless  she  supple- 
mented them  by  something  infinitely  better. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  15 

Goody  Gubbins's  cottage  was  the  worst  in  its  row. 
There,  on  straw  and  rags,  with  chronic  damp  chilling  her 
rheumatic,  palsied  limbs,  and  without  day-light  to  cheer 
her,  her  life  was  barely  kept  in  by  the  Church's  dole, 
although  otherwise  she  lay  quite  uncared  for  and  unsol- 
aced,  her  body  begrimed  and  engrained  with  dirt,  and 
her  grizzled  hair  matted  beneath  her  filthy  linen  curch — 
a  wreck  of  humanity. 

But  Grand'mere  Dupuy,  of  the  Church  under  the  Cross, 
recognized  humanity  under  any  aspect,  and  had  no  quar- 
rel with  it.  There  was  nothing  in  her  but  self-reproach- 
fulness  and  self-forgetfulness,  struggling  for  mastery,  and, 
overpowering  both,  a  mother's  and  a  sister's  tenderness. 
It  was  Yolande  who  revolted  and  shrank  from  the  dis- 
figured, disguised  old  woman,  for  the  keen  French  analy- 
sis, which  records  "how  severe  are  the  young,"  reads  in 
various  ways. 

"  Good-day,  my  friend,"  began  Grand'mere.  "  I  am 
afraid  you  are  very  ailing,  but  you  will  improve,  and  all 
your  ills  will  vanish  by  and  by ;  if  not  here,  hereafter," 
proceeded  she,  in  her  liquid,  persuasive  foreign  accent,  as 
she  nodded  now  and  then  emphatically.  "  We  have  taken 
the  liberty,  and  given  ourselves  the  pleasure  of  bringing 
you  some  soup,"  continued  Grand'mere,  coming  to  the 
gist  of  her  discourse,  and  gathering  up  her  hooped  skirt 
cleverly  as  she  advanced  lightly  (that  is,  lightly  for  her 
fourscore  years)  to  the  side  of  the  bed  or  lair,  the  better 
to  aid  her  pet  of  an  old  woman  to  receive  her  refreshment. 

Goody  had  been  dozing  when  the  Dupuys  invaded  her 
hovel,  and  in  the  dim  light  and  the  gathering  mists  of  age, 
ignorance,  stupidity,  and  suffering,  she  might  well  have 
looked  scared  as  well  as  mazed  when  she  was  aroused  to 
the  unwonted  and  unaccountable  apparition.  "Who  be 
you?"  she  gasped,  clutching  her  torn  coverlet,  and  star- 
ing at  her  visitors  in  blind  hostility  as  well  as  blank 
wonder.  "A  dunna  know  you — you  be  seeking  summal 
of  a  poor  lorn  body.  A's  nought  to  give  or  to  tell.  How 
should  a?"  she  moaned  out,  her  moaning  mixed  with  a 
loud  whimper  of  protest. 

The  reception  was  not  encouraging,  but  Grand'mere 
was  patient. 

"  We  arc  two  of  the  French  family  at  Shottery  Cottag 


16  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

women  like  yourself,  my  good  dame,  and  we  have  heard 
of  your  infirmities.  Ah,  dear  Lord ! — that  they  have  been 
sorely  neglected  so  long.  We  have  come  to  succor  you 
and  ease  them ;  no  to  serve  ourselves,  save  by  serving  you."- 

Goody  Gubbins  had  not  heard  of  very  many  things,  but 
she  had  heard  of  the  French,  to  fight  against  whom  stout 
village  lads  of  her  acquaintance  had  enlisted  as  soldiers 
under  Wolfe  or  Cornwallis,  and  marched  from  their  vil- 
lages, not  one  in  ten  of  them  ever  to  see  their  native  land 
again.  Naturally  she  looked  on  the  French  as  her  mortal 
enemies,  and  when  she  heard  that  the  two  women  were 
members  of  the  French  family  who  had  penetrated  into 
the  village,  through  the  recklessness  of  the  lords  of  the 
castle,  to  get  round  her  and  entrap  her,  bedridden  and 
pauper  as  she  was,  she  set  up  a  screech  of  utmost  dismay 
and  virulent  opposition. 

"  Noa,  noa  !  Pearson !  Neebour  Clay  ! — help  ! — help  ! 
A'm  flayed  !  a'm  murdered !  though  a  never  flapped,  or 
clemmed,  or  so  much  as  set  eye  on  French  maid  or  man 
before  a  took  to  my  bed — not  when  a  were  the  strapping- 
est  wife  and  wench  in  the  parish.     Alack-a-day  !" 

"  You  deceive  yourself,  you  are  in  error ;  rest  quiet. 
Try  the  soup,  my  dear."  And  Grand'mere,  in  the  difficul- 
ty, popped  the  uncovered  pipkin  right  below  Goody's  nose. 

Goocly  Gubbins  had  not  been  called  "  my  dear"  since 
the  day  when  her  good  man  was  lying  in  intermittent 
fever,  induced  by  draughts  of  the  over-ripe  October  of 
which  he  died,  thus  paying  the  penalty  of  his  eight-and- 
forty  hours'  sojourn  at  the  ale-house,  drinking  the  health  of 
the  German  George,  who  had  come  to  be  king  in  the  room 
of  good  Queen  Anne.  She  did  not  take  well  with  the  epi- 
thet ;  it  made  her  grue  just  as  when  Giles  Gubbins  was 
first  "  soft"  with  her,  to  get  her  harvest  wages  out  of  her 
pocket,  and  the  lawful  means  failing,  then  beat  her  black 
and  blue,  and  obtained  his  end  unlawfully,  save  that  it 
\v:ts  in  his  character  of  a  husband.  But  the  smell  of  this 
rich  omnium  gatherum,  which  had  boiled  and  bubbled  till 
it  had  refined  itself  of  every  thing  but  the  very  core  of 
good  things,  was  more  fragrant  than  the  gales  of  Araby 
the  Blest  to  the  stunted,  blunted  nostrils.  She  sniffed  and 
coughed,  and  sniffed  again,  and  her  patriotism  and  preju- 
dices wavered. 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  17 

"There  bean't  snails  in  it?"  she  inquired,  tremulously, 
her  toothless  chops  watering,  her  bleared  eyes  blinking 
greedily. 

"  Not  one.  It  is  the  very  best  of  soups,  my  good  wom- 
an ;  the  true  soup  for  an  invalid,  while  you  have  been 
swallowing — ouf! — hard  roots,  dry  seeds  of  grain,  grease 
and  water." 

"  The  broth  and  the  bit  of  flesh  is  none  so  bad  as  you 
make  it,  be  yourn  what  it  like."  Goody  began  to  speak 
up  for  her  food,  offended,  like  her  betters,  thatTher  right  of 
grumbling  should  be  appropriated  by  a  stranger  and  for- 
eigner. "  If  Pearson's  Sam  and  Sally  weren't  so  long 
on  the  way,  and  didn't  go  to  spill  it  at  the  stile,  and  have 
their  share  of  it  off  their  long  Angers.  There  bean't  toads 
in  it  ?"  pausing  with  revived  jealousy,  after  she  had  ven- 
tured to  taste  and  dwell  on  a  mouthful. 

"No,  no;  faith  of  Genevieve  Dupuy.  But  why  do  you 
object  to  the  poor,  soft,  fat,  white  fellows  of  snails,  when 
you  do  not  refuse  to  eat  the  raw  bleeding  flesh.  The 
mourgettes  are  very  good  for  the  sick,"  remonstrated 
Madame,  with  rash  innocence;  "for  the  frogs,  I  can  tell 
you  they  are  not  so  easy  to  get  here,"  she  reflected,  pen- 
sively. 

"Lawks  !  there  would  be  if  she  could  get  'cm  !"  declared 
the  old  woman,  stiffening  like  stone  and  dropping  the 
spoon.  "  Noa,  noa,  it's  pisen,  it's  witches'  broo  ;  the  corns 
of  barley  and  the  peas  ne'er  grit  agin  my  single  tooth  ;  a 
did  not  taste  ingens ;  it's  like  nought  on  earth  but  balm 
wine  and  the  smell  of  the  dogs'  messes  up  at  the  castle. 
Get  ye  gone!  a  wunna  swallow  another  drop  of  the  broo, 
a've  telled  'ee,  a'll  swound,  a'll  be  throttled  first!"  cried 
Goody,  in  a  renewed  paroxysm  of  terror  and  rage,  and 
thrust  her  rags  into  her  mouth  with  .all  the  force  which  re- 
mained to  her  claw-like  hands. 

So  there  was  nothing  for  it  but  for  Grand'mere  to  re- 
treat before  the  misled  maddened  object  of  her  charity 
should  fulfill  her  threat. 

"  You  see,  Grand'mere,"  observed  Yolande  significantly. 

"She  does  not  know  what  is  good  for  her,  the  poor  suspi- 
cious, straitened  heart.  Yolande,  you  would  not  be  so 
mean  and  foolish  as  to  resent  what  a  poor  miserable  crea- 
ture imagines  to  her  injury,"  Grand'mere  said,  more  re- 


18  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

proachfully  than  usual — indeed,  almost  with  severity — to 
her  grand-daughter.  Then  she  turned  and  began  to  blame 
herself  sharply,  which  was  much  more  in  her  way,  and  a 
safer  course  for  reformers.  "  We  are  punished  because 
we  have  begun  at  the  wrong  end.  We  ought  to  have  ad- 
dressed ourselves  to  the  little  ones,  and  made  friends  of 
them  first.  Look,  they  run  wild,  or  they  are  toilers  from 
their  cradles,  poor  broken-backed,  gloomy-looking  gamins 
and  cocottes,  and  they  grow  up  totally  without  knowledge. 
I  do  not  believe  there  are  six  men  and  women  anions:  the 
peasants  of  Sedge  Pond  can  read  and  write.  The  school 
of  the  pastor  is  for  the  sons  and  daughters  of  the  farmers 
who  can  pay,  the  little  boys  and  girls  in  little  coats  and 
collars,  aprons  and  hoods — the  country  bourgeoisie,  in  fact. 
The  pastor  himself  does  not  encourage  the  little  peasants 
to  come  to  the  school ;  he  says  it  teaches  them  conceit  and 
disrespect  to  their  superiors.  I  heard  him  say  so  in  a  ser- 
mon on  useless  acquirements  and  false  pretenses,  at  the 
church.  But  what  teaching  must  that  have  been !  Even 
the  Jesuit  fathers  and  the  convent  sisters  would  have 
taught  better  than  that.  My  child,  we  will  have  a  little 
class.  Betty  Sykes,  Teddy  Jones,  Pierce  and  Bab  Frew 
(I  pick  up  the  names  as  quickly  as  a  magpie)  will  come, 
and  you  will  instruct  them  in  English  reading,  and  I  shall 
manage  the  writing  and  the  figures,  and  we  will  make 
them  wise — not  foolish,  and  modest — not  insolent.  We 
will  not  tire  of  it,  Butterfly,  because  it  may  not  be  so 
charming  the  second  day  as  the  first.  We  will  work  and 
weary,  and  work  again,  with  the  stolid  little  souls,  because 
it  will  be  our  sowing  for  the  world's  harvest ;  and  I  tell 
you,  Yolande,  we  will  have  fetes  and  recompenses  if  your 
mother  does  not  forbid  them  as  vain  and  worldly." 

Yolande  was  not  sanguine.  Indeed  there  was  no  san- 
guincness  in  the  girl.  All  high  hope  was  the  portion  of 
the  old  woman,  who  had  fathomed  adversity  and  knew 
how  little  it  could  hurt  of  itself,  if  men  and  women  were 
truly  armed  against  it.  But  Yolande  was  docile,  and  fol- 
lowed where  Grand'mere  led  the  way.  So,  with  the 
Lyons  silk  tucked  up,  and  the' coral-headed  staff,  and  with 
the  companion  silk  without  staff,  the  two  went  picking 
their  way  among  the  pools  and  the  dirt-heaps,  from  door 
to  door  of  the  village,  heavy  with  dense  dullness,  or  only 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  19 

quickened  here  and  there  into  rabid  intolerance.  They 
found  every  double-leafed,  cut-across  door  literally  and 
figuratively  shut  in  their  faces,  and  fared  but  poorly  in 
their  canvass  for  the  school.  One  woman  wanted  her 
youngsters  to  watch  the  geese,  feed  the  pig,  break  wood, 
draw  water,  as  she  had  done  in  her  own  young  days,  and 
she  thought  they  could  not  do  better,  or  hope  to  master 
any  thing  which  would  come  more  pat  to  their  hands  in 
after-life.  The  woman  had  right  on  her  side.  Madame 
assured  her  heartily  these  were  very  good  things,  admira- 
ble things,  which  were  referred  to  as  virtues  and  excellen- 
ces in  the  book  of  Proverbs ;  but  were  they  enough  for 
gaining  the  victory  over  sin,  for  enlightening  the  under- 
standing and  disciplining  the  heart?  Say,  then,  were 
they  enough  for  that  other  life  in  the  skies  ? 

"Anan,"  answered  Grand'mere's  opponent.  "  She  left 
all  that  to  Pearson;  that  were  his  business,  and  weren't 
he  paid  for  doing  it?  Poor  bodies  had  enough  to  do  to 
live,  and  fit  their  children  to  live,  in  these  hard  times." 

Another  speaker,  a  gruff  man,  who  had  been  for  years 
employed  hi  the  next  manufacturing  town,  told  Grand'- 
niere  that  they  wanted  no  creeping  spies,  nor  crafty  sedu- 
cers, nor  paid  agents  of  the  foreign  cloth  and  silk  weavers, 
no  gunpowder  and  glass  makers,  who  now  swarmed  in  the 
land  and  preyed  on  it,  and  snatched  the  bite  out  of  the 
mouths  of  honest  English  artisans  by  their  devil's  work  of 
accursed  machinery,  replacing  men's  hands  and  brains. 

"Not  brains,  my  master,"  argued  Madame  mildly, 
"  when  the  machinery  is  the  creature  and  the  tool  of  man's 
brains." 

But  the  master  had  already  retired  into  the  farther  end 
of  his  cottage,  growling  ominously  of  the  horse-pond  i'<>v 
man  or  woman  who  molested  him  with  treacherous  tricks 
of  kindness. 

A  third  hearer  put  her  fingers  in  her  ears. 

"I  was  brought  up  in  the  south  lands.  Fve  seen  the 
towers  and  halls  where  the  good  bishops  stood  and  choked 
in  the  smoke  rather  than  bring  in  the  Pope  to  sit  in  sen- 
let,  put  his  foot  on  our  necks,  and  wade  in  our  Mood  again. 
Good-mother's  grandfeyther  was  a  Puritan  in  the  wars — 
could  pray  like  a  saint,  as  well  as  strike  and  stal>  like  a 
man.     She  had  his  rusty  blunderbuss,  which  was  as  g I 


20  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

as  a  cast  horse-shoe  for  luck,  above  her  chumley.     I  be  not 
your  bargain,  madam." 

Here  was  an  opening  at  last,  which  Grand'mere  was 
quick  to  perceive,  and  radiant  in  seeking  to  profit  by. 

"  My  good  woman,  we  do  not  love  the  Pope  of  Rome 
and  the  mass  any  more  than  you.  We  are  Huguenots, 
who  have  abandoned  our  houses,  our  temples,  our  native 
country,  for  the  truth.  We  have  suffered  like  you.  We 
have  bought  your  protection,  confidence,  and  friendship, 
by  our  sorrows  and  sufferings." 

"  I  (Junna  know  that  we  suffered,"  observed  the  descend- 
ant of  the  Fifth  Monarchy-men,  ungraciously  and  dogged- 
ly. "  Good-mother  always  says  her  grandfeyther  won  his 
battles,  as  the  truth  is  bound  to  win.  And  as  to  buying, 
I'll  maintain  you've  bought  nought  from  me,  neither  good 
nor  bad.  I'd  traffic  with  none  jof  your  breed,  whether 
Huggenies  mean  the  brazen  pack-men  with  rings  in  their 
ears,  under  their  curls,  and  French  linen  and  brandy  be- 
neath the  Irish  linen  and  anise-seed  water  in  their  packs, 
and  who  bowed  their  knees,  crooked  their  fingers,  and 
kissed  the  broken  cross  at  the  Horse  Troughs,  where  the 
four  roads  meet,  before  they  were  shot  by  the  red-coats." 

"  Alas,  my  poor  Jacques  !  The  good  God  grant  you  saw 
beyond  the  symbol,"  murmured  Grand'mere,  the  moisture 
dimming  those  clear,  tender  grey  eyes  of  hers. 

The  speaker  went  on,  rudely  citing  her  unflattering  ex- 
amples— 

"  Or  the  idle,  dissolute  dogs,  players  on  the  French  horns, 
whom  my  lady  brought  down  with  her  the  last  time  to  the 
castle,  who  jabbei*ed  their  monkey-prayers  to  the  pictures 
in  the  picture-gallery." 

The  woman  was  so  irritated  and  alarmed,  that  she  her- 
self pronounced  a  spell  to  protect  her  from  the  offenders — 
a  spell  long  current  in  Protestant  England,  and  occasion- 
ally lugged  out  of  dark,  superstitious  lurking-holes  to  this 
day— 

"Matthew,  Mark,  Luke,  and  John, 
Bless  the  bed  that  I  lie  on." 

This  she  sputtered,  rather  savagely  than  solemnly,  in  the 
tingling,  perplexed  ears  of  Grand'mere  Dupuy,  whose 
fal  hers  had  renounced  j)rayers  to  the  saints  before  the  bat- 
tle of  Pavia. 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  21 

Grand'mere  was  hard  to  be  foiled,  and  was  only  braced 
to  another  essay  by  these  outbursts.  She  had  the  exhaust- 
less  application,  industry,  and  good  humor  of  her  nation, 
and  the  devoted  principles  of  her  sect. 

"We  will  try  neither  the  old  nor  the  young  this  time, 
my  pigeon,  but  a  girl  like  you — the  girl  Deborah  Pott — 
whom  I  have  caught  staring  in  at  our  door  and  windows 
when  she  passes,  and  who  once  ran  after  me  and  restored 
my  sack  when  I  dropped  it,  nearly  knocking  me  down  as 
she  did  so.  She  is  not  pretty — she  is  an  ugly,  ungainly 
creature;  but  I  think  she  has  what  is  better  "than  beauty, 
and  only  second  to  grace  and  goodness — wit,  mother-wit 
they  call  it  in  England.  But  this  lost  child  has  no  mother, 
only  a  step-mother,  who  gives  her  the  kindness  of  the  law 
— no  more.  Oh !  well,  it  is  good  that  she  gives  her  that. 
She  can  not  make  a  mother's  heart  for  a  child  who  is  not 
hers,  and  she  may  be  so  unfortunate  as  to  forget  to  pray 
for  it.  Our  Priscille  tells  me  Mother  Pott  is  a  poor  widow 
with  a  large  family  to  rear,  and  no  wonder  she  is  sharp  in 
the  tongue  as  steel  or  vinegar.  Yet  she  shelters  and  feeds 
this  Deborah  with  what  help  she  can  get  from  the  girl's 
work  in  the  fields,  and  without  much  hope  of  giving  her 
away  in  marriage.  However,  Deborah  has  a  wise  woman's 
name,  and  if  she  has  wit,  we  will  give  her  a  dowry — not 
that  we  have  money — '  silver  and  gold  have  we  none,'  my 
little  Yolande,  save  what  my  son  can  spare  to  Philippine 
to  keep  the  house  and  furnish  the  linen-presses  and  the 
wardrobes  afresh  ;  but  we  have  our  gifts  and  our  accom- 
plishments, though  the  country  people  here  think  so  little 
of  them.  Deborah,  with  the  wise  woman's  name,  will  be  a 
doctoress.  We  will  teach  her  our  skill  in  the  herbs,  which 
our  family  have  had  since  Bernardo  Romilly  stanched  the 
wounds  of  the  great  Conde :  that  will  be  one  dowry  for 
her;  and  the  cambric-darning,  the  lace-mending,  the  work- 
ing of  clocks  into  hose,  will  be  another.  She  may  not  get 
a  husband,  for  I  have  my  suspicions  that  the  English  Lads 
are  not  wise  in  their  own  interests;  but  it  does  not  signi- 
fy, my  Deborah  will  be  a  mother  in  Sedge  Pond,  and  she 
will  nurse  the  generations  of  the  future. " 

At  first  it  seemed  that  Grand'mfcre  Dupuy  had  finally 
hit  the  mark.  Great  uncouth  Deborah  Potl  had  not  been 
SO  used  to  preferment  that  she  should  scout  this  ;  she  had 


22  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

faced  too  many  real  evils  in  the  bare  cold  lodging,  which 
was  hardly  a  home,  to  recoil  from  the  strange  French- 
woman as  the  rest  of  the  villagers  did.  Moreover,  Debo- 
rah Pott  was  of  an  inquisitive,  dauntless  turn  of  mind, 
which  disposed  her  to  venture  on  the  opening  of  any  oyster 
which  the  world  might  present  to  her. 

"  My  service,  marm  :  I'd  like  to  come  and  try,  if  moth- 
er 'ud  hear  of  it.  She's  wicious,  mother  is,  when  she's  axed 
aught,  because,  as  she  says,  she's  worritted  enough  with- 
out that  plague  into  the  bargain ;  but  she  comes  round 
most  times  after  she's  been  wild  a  bit,  and  she  allers  said 
she'd  be  main  set  up  to  be  well  rid  of  me." 

This  speech  was  delivered  with  many  a  bob  of  an  origi- 
nal, irregular  courtesy  by  the  fluttered,  important  Deborah, 
whom  Grand'mere  and  Yolande  had  waylaid  as  she  was 
returning  from  her  field-work,  with  her  long  step,  and  short 
petticoat  and  shorter  gown  stained  with  clay,  and  her 
steeple-crowned  hat,  hardly  browner  than  her  brick-brown 
face,  and  her  hoe  over  her  shoulder. 

But  the  bright  prospect  of  siiccess  was  soon  dashed 
when  Deborah  came  running  over  to  Shottery  Cottage, 
bellowing  all  the  way  like  a  lubberly  boy. 

"  Here  I  be  to  tell  you — I  be  never  to  come  nigh  hand 
you,  or  to  speak  to  you  again.  Mother  swears  I  be  the 
pest  of  her  life,  and  a  tomboy  of  a  lass  that  will  stick  to 
her  like  a  burdock ;  but  she'll  claw  me  and  whack  me  till 
there's  never  a  rag  of  skin  on  my  bones  or  a  whole  bone  in 
my  body,  and  she'll  have  the  mischief  shook  out  of  me 
(and  I  be  right  sure  it  never  corned  there  till  you  put  it 
in,  mistress) ;  she'll  never  fee  me  to  a  wanton,  play-acting, 
crazy  old  French  queen,  as  would  have  her  base  job  out  of 
me,  and  mix  me  up  in  her  vile  plots,  and  leave  me  to  hang 
by  the  neck  at  Tyburn  till  I  were  '  dead,  dead,  dead,'  like 
Punch's  Judy,  when  she  were  done  with  me.  Lawk-a- 
daisy !  lawk-a-daisy !" 

Now  Grand'mere  knew  the  sum  of  the  accusation 
against  her,  and  for  a  moment  felt  cut  to  the  heart.  That 
she — a  clever,  provident,  diligent  woman  in  her  day,  proud 
of  her  housekeeping,  and  her  various  arts  in  keeping  ac- 
counts, dispensing  advice  and  assistance,  rearing  and  train- 
ing children,  handmaids,  and  even  apprentices  and  clerks, 
as  she  had  done  in  the  old  velouterie,  with  which  the  Du- 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  23 

puys  had  been  connected  for  generations,  should  be  re- 
garded as  an  unpractical,  hare-brained  enthusiast,  was  most 
mortifying.  That  she,  the  humblest,  most  grateful  woman 
in  the  world,  should  be  branded  as  an  interloper  and  a 
supplanter  of  other  workers,  a  filcher  of  their  gains,  made 
her  sigh  deeply, — but  that  she,  a  Huguenot,  traditionally 
descended  from  the  Albigenses,  with  their  Champ  de  Sang 
and  Mas  Calvi,  educated  in  the  most  uncompromising  an- 
tagonism to  the  Roman  hierarchy  and  the  Roman  Catholic 
creed — that  she,  an  exile  for  her  faith,  should  be  accused 
of  vile  purposes  and  plots,  brought  tears  to  her  grey  eyes. 

To  be  thus  confounded  with  her  persecutors  and  foes, 
in  spite  of  her  loud^  protest,  to  be  ranked  with  them  in 
their  glaring  errors  by  those  who  were  very  nearly  as 
groveling,  degraded,  and  pagan  as  the  lowest  of  the  Cath- 
olics they  condemned,  was  a  bitter  drop  in  poor  Grand'- 
mere's  cup.  That  she,  an  aged  widow  woman,  living  in 
strict  seclusion  under  her  son's  roof,  and  the  adherent  of  a 
Reformer  whose  followers,  in  their  reaction  from  license, 
profligacy,  and  infidelity,  were  staid  even  to  moroseness, 
and  rigid  to  austerity,  should  be  picked  out  and  pointed 
at  as  a  light,  cruel  kidnapper  and  destroyer  of  younj,- 
girls,  was  almost  too  much  for  her  kindly  nature.  But 
still  she  was  able  to  bear  the  grievous  misconstruction 
without  malice ;  which  was  needful,  for  Yolande  burst  out 
in  a  girl's  vehement  spite  and  scorn. 

"But  why  do  they  abuse  and  slander  us?"  she  urged, 
bitterly. 

"  But  why  ?"  echoed  Grand'mere,  meekly.  "  I  know 
not,  unless  they  have  forgotten,  or  never  heard,  how  they 
admired  and  applauded  our  first  service  in  the  crypt  of 
Canterbury  Cathedral,  and  only  recognize  us  to  taunt  and 
deride  us  as  we  come  out  of  the  French  chapel  in  Hog 
Lane,  at  the  Seven  Dials." 

In  the  singleness  of  heart,  which  is  akin  to  second  Bight, 
Grand'mere  did  more  than  forbear;  she  arrived  at  a  par- 
tial comprehension  of  the  cause  of  her  failure.  Her  poor 
— her  children  as  she  had  called  them — had  been  too  much 
children  to  her,  as  they  are  prone  to  be  in  those  sloth  and 
languor-inspiring  southern  provinces  so  long  subjected  i" 
the  yoke.  Saxon  vigor  could  never  stoop  to  such  fostering 
and  to  such  helplessness ;    it  were  to  strike  at  it  root  and 


24  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

branch  to  attempt  this.  Reformation,  to  be  effectual,  must 
work  from  within,  not  from  without.  The  English,  re- 
formed by  mandates  of  king  and  counsel,  were  not  yet 
quite  sensible  of  what  true  reformation  was;  while  as  to 
the  French  reformers,  every  one  of  them  had  had  to  go 
for  himself  into  the  desert,  and  had  thus  become  noble, 
independent,  and  manly  in  his  writhing  agonies — protest- 
ing and  steadfast  in  every  nerve  and  maimed  limb.  And 
now  the  time  was  come  for  the  two  to  meet  and  teach 
each  other. 

Grand'mere  had  been  hasty,  puffed  up,  and  rash ;  she 
told  herself  all  that,  and  it  was  true  in  a  degree ;  but 
Grand'mere' s  faults  were  better  than  her  neighbor's  vir- 
tiies,  just  as  the  doubts  of  Nicodemus  and  Martin  Luther 
were  better  than  the  faith  of  other  doctors  of  the  Sanhe- 
drim, and  other  monks. 


CHAPTER  III. 

THE   DUPUY   HOUSEHOLD. 

The  Dupuy  household  consisted  of  Monsieur  and  Mad- 
ame Dupuy;  Yolande,  their  only  child;  Grand'mere, 
Monsieur's  mother ;  and  Priscilla,  or  Priseille,  or  Prie,  as 
the  French  tongues  variously  named  a  club-footed,  taci- 
turn, elderly  English  maid-servant  attached  to  their  ser- 
vice. The  family  was  from  Languedoc,  which  had  been 
the  very  heart  of  the  great  heretical  movement  from  the 
days  of  Richard  of  the  Lion  Heart.  The  people  of  that 
province  have  some  of  the  liveliness  of  their  Gascon  neigh- 
bors, but  it  is  crossed  by  Italian  moodiness  and  passion. 

The  Dupuys  had  emigrated  to  England  among  the  crowds 
from  Languedoc,  Angoumois,  Brittany,  Picardy,  Alsace, 
Champagne,  Auvergne,  and  Provence,  where  some  of  the 
hereditary  nobility  still  bore  on  their  shields  the  emblem- 
atic torches  and  stars  of  the  Albigenses.  They  had  been 
forced  to  escape  with  their  lives  owing  to  the  long-con- 
tinued consequences  of  there  vocation  of  the  Edict  of 
Nantes.  They  suffered  under  political  disabilities;  then- 
church  services,  and  even  their  marriages,  were  illegal. 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  25 

Their  pains  and  penalties  were  innumerable,  and  scorn  and 
contumely  had  been  heaped  upon  them  down  even  to  the 
days  of  Jean  Jacques,  and  the  gushing,  fermenting  religion 
of  nature. 

So  far  as  the  Dupuys  were  concerned,  the  exodus  had 
taken  place  twenty  years  ago,  three  or  four  years  before 
Yolande  was  born.  Silk  manufacturers  by  hereditary 
trade,  they  had  at  first  settled  in  the  colony  of  Spitalficbls. 
As  years  wore  on,  however,  M.  Dupuy,  by  his  busi- 
ness qualifications,  and  notwithstanding  difficulties,  had 
attained  a  certain  amount  of  prosperity  and  means ;  and 
as  Madame's  health  showed  symptoms  of  failing,  he  with- 
drew from  greater  interest  in  business  than  what  was  im- 
plied in  his  braving  the  clangers  of  the  road,  and  the  gen- 
tlemen of  the  road,  in  periodical  coach  journeys — quarter- 
ly, or  more  frequently,  as  necessity  demanded — between 
London  and  Norwich.  The  family  settled  in  the  quiet 
village  of  Sedge  Pond,  which  presented  at  first  sight  to 
tired,  battered  wayfarers  like  them  as  secure  a  place  of 
rest  and  shelter  as  deceitful  appearances  could  offer. 

There  the  Dupuys  had  dwelt  from  spring  to  summer  in 
complete  isolation  and  seclusion,  the  sole  interlude  and  in- 
cident in  their  lives  being  Monsieur's  departures  and  re- 
turns, and  the  exciting  risks  by  flood  and  field,  from  storms, 
overturns,  and  horse-pistols  of  which  His  Majesty's  high- 
way then  presented  a  bountiful  supply.  But  Grand'mere 
was  kept  active  by  other  impulses;  for  notwithstanding 
all  her  experience,  she  was  unable  to  regard  Christianity 
— even  Reformed  Christianity,  with  its  half-healed  wounds 
and  rankling  wrongs — as  a  religion  requiring  one  to  re- 
tire, like  an  Englishman,  into  one's  castle,  raising  the  draw- 
bridge and  letting  fall  the  portcullis.  She  did  not  under- 
stand that  to  live  in  peace  with  all  men  was  only  to  be  at- 
tained by  living  apart  from  all  men — "neither  making  nor 
meddling  in  their  concerns."  Therefore  Grand'mere  in- 
stinctively tried  the  innocent  wiles  of  her  own  pleasant 
land;  and  from  her  sacred,  sunny,  hoary  height  of  four- 
score years  she  looked  down  full  of  hope,  and  vyas  piteous 
only  when  the  wiles  failed. 

The  Dupuys,  not  merely  exiles,  but  withdrawn  even  from 
their  fellow-exiles,  were  thus  thrown  in  upon  themselves 
with  the  force  of  their  national,  sectarian  peculiarities  left 

B 


26  TIIE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY. 

intact ;  but  they  preserved  their  individual  distinctions 
so  well  that  they  bore  no  great  family  likeness.  The  cri- 
sis, it  is  true,  had  worked  powerfully  on  all  the  materials, 
but  the  materials  were  widely  and  permanently  affected 
by  sex,  age,  and  personal  history.  The  result  was  that 
they  presented  such  warp  and  woof  of  good  and  evil  as 
French  Huguenots,  English  Puritans,  and  Scotch  Cove- 
nanters supply  each  in  turn  to  the  dispassionate  and  candid 
observer.  Monsieur  was  a  Huguenot  in  name  and  politics, 
just  as. Praise-God  Barebones  was  a  Puritan  or  Erskine  of 
Grange  a  Calvinist ;  he  was  on  that  account  the  more 
tenacious  in  retaining  the  little  he  had  left  to  make  up  for 
the  much  he  had  lost.  He  was  a  zealous,  energetic,  influ- 
ential member  of  that  foreign  society  which  has  only 
within  late  years  been  broadly  recognized  as  a  moving- 
spring  and  leaven  in  English  annals,  and  justly  recorded 
as  such.  But  even  in  those  days  it  found  some  manly, 
generous  defenders,  and  certain  acts  and  clauses  of  acts 
were  wisely  and  liberally  passed  in  the  British  Parliament 
for  its  protection.  But  the  defense  was  so  ineffectual,  and 
so  weakly  were  the  protective  clauses  put  in  force,  that 
false  prophets  and  revolutionists  were  taken  as  the  expo- 
nents and  representatives  of  the  refugees,  and  to  pay  them 
back  in  fit  coin  they  were  caricatured  and  villifiecl  even  by 
William  Hogarth,  who  was  gentle  to  the  Methodists. 
But  there  were  more  substantial  outrages,  too.  Silk-mills, 
like  that  of  Derby,  were  set  on  fire,  and  the  sluices  of  great 
Yorkshire  were  undermined.  It  was  an  ordinary  occur- 
rence for  foreign  workmen  to  be  felled  with  bludgeons ; 
and  households  such  as  the  Dupuys,  were  like  small  colo- 
nies of  ants  in  an  empire  of  hornets. 

Such  a  society  had  to  fight  hard  for  its  existence,  and 
had  to  be  united  by  all  ties  whether  kindred  or  selfish. 
The  men  who  formed  and  cemented  it,  were  certainly  men 
of  tact  and  vigor  ;  and  they  have  left  proof  of  this  in  the 
great  French  names  which  figure  in  England's  story  in  the 
succeeding  generations. 

But  Monsieur  Dupuy  suffered  the  blight  which  the  faith 
of  many  men,  especially  Frenchmen,  who  are  far  more 
speculative  than  emotional,  suffers  on  the  dissipation  of 
early  illusions  and  prejudices.  Coming  out  of  a  concen- 
trated, narrowing  atmosphere,  where  the  views  of  life  were 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  27 

exaggerated  and  spasmodic,  and  having  his  eyes  opened  to 
the  falseness  of  many  of  the  lights  seen  through  the  highly 
colored,  distorted  medium,  and  to  the  retaliating  aggression 
and  intolerance  of  some  of  the  most  cherished  dogmas,  he 
gaveway  to  the  reactionary  feeling  which  has  been  ever  only 
too  plentiful  among  such  a  society.  Monsieur  was  a  good 
Huguenot  in  so  far  as  he  remained  stanchly,  consistently 
mindful  of  his  own  wrongs  as  a  Frenchman,  and  was  stern- 
ly opposed  to  the  Roman  Catholic  Church.  But  he  went 
no  farther  than  this,  and  was  in  every  other  sense  unmis- 
takably, undisguisedly,  a  man  of  the  world.  Madame, 
his  wife,  who  thought  differently,  never  ceased,  openly  and 
pointedly,  to  bemoan  his  declension,  and  to  sit  in  judgment 
on  it  with  mingled  gloom  and  asperity ;  and  though  he 
was  too  much  of  a  bourgeois  gentleman  and  French  hus- 
band to  snap  his  fingers,  he  certainly  did  shrug  his  shoul- 
ders at  her.  Grand'mere,  with  her  great,  sweet  charily, 
made  allowance  for  his  difficulties,  temptations,  and  dangers, 
and  bore  with  him,  believed  in  him,  and  hoped  in  him. 
And  the  best  thing  in  Monsieur  was  his  conduct  to  his 
mother.  He  was  a  provoking,  jibing  husband,  an  indiffer- 
ent, careless  father,  but  he  was  Grand'mere's  stay  and  sup- 
port in  all  duty  and  honor ;  nay,  he  was  more ;  the  sallow, 
periwigged  man  of  fifty  was  as  deferential  and  as  tender 
in  his  tone  to  the  grandmother  of  the  family  as  when  she 
was  the  house-mistress,  and  he  a  chubby  boy  at  her  apron- 
strinsj. 

Madame  Dupuy  could  not  be  called  an  unhappy  woman. 
for  she  was  one  of  those  who  luxuriate  in  their  woes  ;  but 
hers  was  not  a  nature  calculated  to  make  others  happy. 
She  was  a  woman  of  the  closet,  with  the  faults  of  the 
closet  opposed  to  the  sins  of  the  world.  She  was  sincere, 
constant,  virtuous,  and  pious  in  her  own  way,  but  then  that 
was  quite  a  French  way.  She  was  more  respectful  ami 
submissive  to  her  mother-in-law  as  a  daughter  than  she 
was  to  her  husband  as  a  wife;  while  as  a  mother  herself 
she  exacted  unqualified  obedience,  and  was  careful  and 
anxious,  but  not  fond.  She  had  been  upward  of  twenty 
years  in  England,  which  had  served  her  so  far  as  a  haven 
of  refuge  and  an  adopted  country,  but  she  had  do1  « 1  i  -  - 
covered  a  single  merit  in  it!  She  had  been  six  months  at 
Sedge  Pond  without  crossing  her  door-step,  except  t"  at- 


28  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

tend  the  English  church-service,  the  only  service  within  her 
reach — the  Lutheran  form  of  which  she  not  only  deeply 
lamented  over,  hut  hitterly  resented.  She  took  no  inter- 
est in  any  thing  in  the  wide  world  heyond  her  own  family, 
her  fellow-exiles,  her  church,  and  her  country — the  latter 
of  which  she  had  left  to  lying  prophets  and  the  destroyer. 
She  discoursed  continually  on  one  or  other  of  these  sub- 
jects, dwelling  particularly  on  the  trials  and  persecutions 
of  Huguenot  history,  until  they  seemed  to  shadow  with  a 
black  pall  all  that  grew  and  flourished,  smiled  and  re- 
joiced, on  the  face  of  the  earth,  and  until  her  talk  was  like 
a  passionate  protest  against  the  government  of  the  great 
God  and  Father  of  all,  whom  she  feared,  and  only  feared. 
When  she  spoke  of  her  church  and  her  country,  she  did 
not  dwell  as  Grand'mere  did  on  fruits  ripened  under  the 
sharp  frost  of  pain  and  anguish.  She  did  not  dilate  with 
delight  on  gallant  endurance,  on  love  stronger  than  death, 
on  patience,  charity,  purity,  or  heavenly-mindedness ;  she 
never  credited  or  reported  the  remorse  and  ruth,  the  pity, 
the  kindness,  the  generous  pleading,  in  the  formidable  face 
of  hostile  despotism,  of  those  who,  like  the  Prince  of  She- 
chem,  were  more  noble  than  all  the  house  of  their  fathers. 
It  was  not  of  the  Christian  chivalry  of  Agrippa  d'Au- 
bigne  in  many  a  siege  and  battle-field,  nor  of  the  Christian 
loyalty  of  Madame  de  la  Force,  that  she  waxed  eloquent. 
Not  of  the  noble,  half-mad  prophetess,  Marie  Villiers ;  not 
of  the  common  ground  on  which  a  Bossuet  might  meet  a 
Claude,  or  a  Fenelon  in  his  archicpiscopal  chair  a  Paul 
Rabaud  in  the  desert,  did  she  speak.  It  was  of  men  hung 
by  the  thumbs  till  the  blood  spurted  from  underneath 
their  nails,  of  women  frightened  into  fits  by  hideous  spec- 
tacles, of  drums  beaten  night  and  day  to  deprive  the 
wretched  of  the  last  human  resource — the  oblivion  of 
sleep;  it  was  of  desecrated  temples  and  their  dismal  deso- 
lation, of  the  galleys,  the  hurdle,  and  the  hangman,  that 
she  incessantly  clamored. 

No  wonder  then  that  Yolande  Dupuy,  with  her  mental 
appetite  fed  on  such  a  diet,  should  grow  up  sad,  sombre, 
and  scornful,  with  a  perplexed,  scared  look  in  the  midst  of 
her  youth  and  beauty.  Had  she  been  a  lad,  a  young  Han- 
nibal, she  might  have  been  tempted  to  swear  some  deadly 
heathen  oath  that  she  would  live  to  be  avenged  on  the 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  29 

foes  whom  Christ  tells  us  to  forgive  as  we  hope  to  be  for- 
given. Without  Grand'mere,  there  is  no  saying  how  un- 
girl-like  Yolande  might  have  been.  She  would  certainly 
have  been  more  absorbed  in  the  centuries-long  injuries  of 
her  sect  and  race ;  more  chilled  by  the  dank,  cold  atmos- 
phere of  prisons  and  tombs ;  more  unsusceptible  to  those 
sweet,  balmy  influences  and  bountiful  consolations  of  God 
in  nature  and  humanity,  which  call  upon  all  men,  however 
tried  and  however  down-trodden,  not  simply  to  stifle  then- 
sobs  and  hide  their  wounds  with  the  heroism  of  the  an- 
cient Stoic,  but  to  take  heart,  look  up  and  resume  their 
march,  in  the  confidence  of  free-born  sons  and  daughters 
of  the  Lord  Almighty,  as  knowing  that  their  redemption 
draweth  nigh.  For  Yolande  had  no  relief  derived  from 
the  robust,  cheery  presence  of  such  a  privileged,  hearty, 
confidential  family  servant  as  a  French  Fifine  or  Solaire 
might  have  been.  Priscille,  thouo-h  she  had  taken  Yolande 
as  a  new-born  child  into  her  arms,  and  was  inseparably 
identified  and  bound  up  with  the  family,  was  yet  by  tem- 
per, infirmity,  and  circumstance,  graver,  more  reserved 
and  taciturn,  than  any  austere  Huguenot  born  and  bred. 
She  was  a  gruff  woman  with  a  temper,  whose  humor  was 
so  dry  that,  like  old  wine,  it  required  an  old  and  disci- 
plined palate  to  appreciate  it ;  and  indeed,  it  was  true  that 
old  Grand'mere  would  nod  and  shake  her  neat,  trim  old 
sides  at  Priscille's  brevity  and  unpremeditated  strokes  of 
sarcasm. 

Grand'mere  was  the  sole  sunbeam  in  the  family.  She 
was  a  living  disproval  of  any  notion  which  might  have  ex- 
isted that  it  was  tribulation  in  itself  which  had  rendered 
the  family  so  still  and  severe.  She  had  suffered  more 
tribulation  than  any  of  them — than  all  of  them  put  to- 
gether— for  she  had  lived  nearer  the  darkest,  most  cruel 
days  of  blood  and  fire.  Grand'mere  had  seen  Huguenots, 
whose  only  crime  had  been  attending  a  religious  uniting 
of  their  own  persuasion,  walking  behind  a  troop  of  infant- 
ry, collars  of  iron  around  their  necks,  and  heavy  chains 
linking  them  four  to  four  and  six  to  six,  ami  yet  daring  to 
bare  their  brave  heads,  and  sing  one  of  Clement  Marot's 
psalms — 

"  Jamais  ne  cesserai 
Dc  magnifier  lc  Seigneur.'' 


30  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Ay,  her  own  elder  brother,  Blaise,  had  been  one  of  the 
men  who  with  cramped  limbs,  swollen  by  the  weight  of 
their  fetters  and  the  damp  straw  on  which  they  had  lain 
the  previous  night,  dragged  themselves  along,  singing  tri-' 
umphantly  as  they  went  on  their  way  to  wanton  insult, 
wasting  sickness,  and  an  early  deliverance  by  death.  And 
not  only  this — Grand'mere's  husband  not  being  a  reformed 
pastor,  who  was  allowed  the  favor  of  taking  on  himself 
without  molestation  the  execution  of  his  sentence  of  per- 
petual banishment — had  been  caught  in  the  act  of  escaping 
from  the  country  which  condemned  and  abhorred  him,  and 
had  to  work  as  a  slave,  fastened  to  a  bench,  under  the  al- 
most tropical  sun  of  Marseilles,  where  he  had  been  flogged 
and  bastinadoed  for  three  endless  years.  On  obtaining 
his  release,  through  a  singular  act  of  clemency,  he  returned 
to  his  home  a  bloodless  skeleton,  a  harmless,  light-brained, 
mazed  man,  paralyzed  not  in  body,  but  in  heart. 

Yet  Grand'mere  could  laugh  and  sing  now.  It  was  not 
from  French  levity,  but  because,  in  her  day,  she  could 
"cry  with  the  best."  These  tremendous  crosses  and  tor- 
tures had  not  been  without  their  blessed  light  and  their 
balm — not  without  their  crushed  fragrance  of  meekness, 
their  lofty  consciousness  of  rectitude,  their  solemn  tender 
consolation  of  walking  in  the  very  footsteps  of  prophets, 
apostles,  martyrs,  and  even  of  the  great  Master  himself; 
else  whence  the  force  of  the  "Blessed  are  ye  when  all  men 
shall  revile  you  and  persecute  you?"  But  it  is  not  so 
much  in  the  actual  endurance  as  in  the  after-thought  of 
great  tribulation  that  flesh  and  blood  cry  out,  nature  re- 
volts, and  all  the  smaller,  meaner  passions  come  out  to  coil 
and  spring  like  a  brood  of  snakes  on  their  prey.  To 
GrancPmere  these  old  sorrows  were  far  away  on  the  dim 
and  distant  horizon,  divided  from  her  by  more  than  one 
life-time.  Grand'mere  was  on  those  hills  of  Beulah  near 
to  the  land  where  there  is  nothing  to  hurt  or  destroy  in  all 
God's  holy  mountain. 

Thus  the  Huguenot  household  abode  in  the  grey  solid 
little  Shottery  Cottage  with  its  square  casements  and 
hood-like  porch.  They  were  distinct  and  peculiar  as  any 
Jewish  household,  while  the  old  village  of  Sedge  Pond  lay 
couchant  in  the  attitude  and  temper  of  a  sluttish,  drowsy 
mastiff.     Passers-by  could  see  through  the  cottage  case- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  31 

merits,  ajar  or  wide  open  in  summer,  into  the  house ;  and 
through  the  glass-door  or  the  wicket  into  the  garden, 
which  occupied  a  corner  of  the  castle-park,  with  its  ter- 
races, its  pleached  arbor,  and  its  grotesque  monster  or  two 
in  box  or  yew.  But  what  most  attracted  the  eye  of  the 
villagers  was  the  pond,  which  they  declared  was  kept  for 
and  stored  with  frogs,  or  the  rapid  growth  of  strange  herbs 
and  vegetables — chicory,  endive,  brilliant  scarlet  beans, 
which  were  regarded  as  being  equally  uncanny  and  unfa- 
miliar. And  then,  too,  figures  were  often  to  be  seen  mov- 
ing among  the  flowers  or  seated  in  the  rooms.  Eyes  were 
perhaps  apathetic  in  peering  at  first,  but  there  was  no 
want  of  strength  of  disparagement  in  the  owners  when 
once  they  looked,  and  stared  at  Monsieur,  more  flabby  than 
lean-fleshed,  and  not  very  remarkable  in  his  rusty  brown 
suit,  plain  cravat,  knee-breeches,  and  square  shoes  with 
square  buckles.  Yet  though  he  was  more  conformable  in 
gait  and  garment  to  English  fashions  than  his  womenkind, 
he  would  seem  odd  enough  to  these  stupid  eyes  as  he  led 
Grand'niere  by  the  tips  of  the  fingers  to  her  seat  at  table, 
or  from  the  pleached  arbor  to  her  room.  "Well  was  it  that 
these  villagers  saw  not  all  his  graces  of  deportment,  for  he 
would  stand  many  minutes  at  the  back  of  her  chair  as 
courtly  and  insinuating  as  if  he  had  been  a  prince  and  she 
a  princess,  he  a  young  lover  and  she  his  mistress.  Then 
the  rest  of  the  fiimily  made  up  a  curious  picture.  Madame 
Dupuy,  in  the  perpetual  mourning  which  the  later  Hugue- 
not women  assumed,  sat  precise  and  cheerless,  with  more 
wrinkles  and  furrows  in  her  narrow  forehead  than  con- 
tracted Grand'mere's  broad  fair  one,  and  her  guzzled  hair 
as  if  in  mourning,  too,  like  the  rest  of  her  attire;  while 
Yolande,  in  dress,  was  a  fac-simile  of  her  grandmother,  al- 
though the  two  models  were  so  very  different — the  one  so 
old,  small,  fair,  sweet,  and  bright,  the  other  so  young,  tall, 
and  grey-toned  in  contradiction  to  the  firmer,  fuller  out- 
lines. There  was  indeed  a  flavor  of  tartness  about  the 
picture,  and  a  permanent  Rembrandtish  gloom  which  was 
not  without  its  mystery  and  its  charm. 

The  public  rooms  of  the  cottage  wire  not  divided  into 
better  and  worse  parlors,  as  in  other  English  cottages  and 
middle  class  or  small  gentry's  houses  of  the  time,  but  into 
the  man's  room  and  the  women's  room.     The  man's  room 


32  TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

was  half  study,  half  business  room,  crowded  and  cumbered 
with  heavy  chests  and  boxes.  A  black  cabinet,  with  nu- 
merous shalloAV  drawers  and  doors  quaintly  carved  with 
scenes  from  the  life  of  King  Solomon,  stood  in  one  corner,- 
and  escritoires,  suggesting  a  lingering  grasp  of  trade,  and 
hinting  of  reverential  preservation  of  family  and  party 
records  and  relics,  in  the  other.  The  only  visitors  who  had 
yet  appeared  at  Sedge  Pond  were  received  by  Monsieur 
before  they  were  met  and  entertained  by  the  general  fami- 
ly, and  that  with  a  hospitality  staid  and  subdued,  but 
striking  in  its  ungrudgingness,  for  it  was  the  only  outlay 
which  the  strangers,  economical  to  penuriousness  in  En- 
glish eyes,  did  not  grudge  and  stint  themselves  in.  The 
visitors  were  emigrants  like  themselves,  more  or  less  fresh 
from  France,  or  worn  into  foreign  grooves.  There  were 
agents  of  emigrants  too,  and  with  them  occasionally  came 
Englishmen,  so  allied  to  them  in  business  as  to  have  got 
over  the  salient  points  on  which  they  and  the  emigrants 
stood  aloof  from  each  other.  Sometimes,  'also,  there  would 
be  a  sprinkling  of  other  foreigners — sputtering  Swiss,  bland 
Italians,  and  phlegmatic  Dutch,  as  they  passed  to  and  from 
Norwich  and  London,  in  the  interests  of  the  newly-estab- 
lished or  renovated  silk  manufactures  which  were  carried 
on  in  small,  dingy,  and  most  inconvenient  manufactories, 
where  the  looms,  still  waiting  for  Jacquard,  were  so  com- 
plicated and  so  little  adapted  to  the  human  shape  and 
movements  that  the  canuts  of  Lyons,  who  had  worked  at 
them  for  generations,  were  notoriously  a  crippled,  dwarfed, 
and  diseased  class.  After  all,  it  was  an  odd  shaping  of 
circumstances  which  made  a  remote,  thoroughly  insular 
village,  not  even  on  any  of  the  great  roads,  become  a  chos- 
en meeting-place  and  rendezvous  of  those  who,  to  nine- 
tenths  of  even  enlightened  Englishmen,  figured,  not  with- 
out reason,  as  very  suspicious  characters. 

The  women's  room  had  its  elaborate,  monotonous,  time- 
consuming  work — carpet -work,  embroidery,  and  fine  lace- 
weaving,  which  Madame  Dupuy  did  not  disapprove  of, 
but  considered  a  necessary  element  of  strict  discipline,  and 
praiseworthy  in  itself,  however  objectionable  in  its  results. 
The  room  had  no  harpsichord,  nor  hint  of  diversion,  nor 
suggestion  of  occupation  beyond  books  of  recipes  and  ac- 
counts.    There  were  one  or  two  treasured  volumes  of  fa- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  33 

mous  treatises  and  discourses  by  Reformed  pastors,  a  work 
of  Jean  Calvin  himself,  and  a  volume  for  which,  in  its  sim- 
plicity and  purity,  they  had  sacrificed,  and  well  sacrificed, 
country  and  people,  credit,  comfort,  outward  peace.  Grand'- 
mere's passion  for  birds  and  flowers,  and  indeed  all  living 
things,  was  less  artificially  indulged  than  was  common 
with  her  country-women,  and  this  rendered  the  women's 
room  barer,  more  rigidly  matter  of  fact.  Grand'mere's 
own  room,  in  spite  of  its  great  linen  bed  and  curtained 
doors,  was  perfectly  simple,  as  became  a  Huguenot  apart- 
ment,'but  she  had  her  jardiniere  in  the  window,  in  which 
she  grew  spiked  lavender  and  African  marigolds,  just  like 
those  the  women  of  Languedoc  stick  in  their  black  hair 
behind  their  ears  ;  and  she  would  catch  herself  calling  to 
Yolande  to  shut  the  casement  on  a  chill  day,  for  fear  of 
the  cutting  mistral.  Yes,  here,  where  the  old  Avoman  who 
had  suffered  so  much  in  the  long  past  was  to  be  met  pecu- 
liarly, there  were  to  be  found  grace,  fancy,  dignity,  and  a 
kind  of  refined  bravery. 

In  the  women's  room  the  family,  the  members  of  which 
did  not  meet  for  breakfast,  but  supped  their  messes  of  soup 
stepping  out  of  bed,  or  walking  about  the  house,  met  for 
the  noon  dinner,  which  was  composed  largely  of  vegeta- 
bles and  such  fruit  as  Sedge  Pond  yielded — a  diet  before 
which,  as  opposed  to  corned  beef  and  stock-fish,  it  was 
quite  true,  as  Grand'mere  had  boasted,  that  scurvy  and 
leprosy  disappeared.  There  they  ate  their  equally  tem- 
perate supper,  not  drinking  any  thing  so  strong  and  sub- 
stantial as  home-brewed  ale,  or  so  spicy  as  elder-flower 
wine,  but  unutterably  mawkish  and  insipid  milks  and 
waters  of  their  own  compounding,  and,  in  rarer  instances, 
when  they  had  visitors,  their  vinegar  wine.  Monsieur 
pondered,  wrote,  and  calculated,  and  waited  on  the  mail 
twice  a  week,  just  as  busily  and  assiduously  as  if  he  were 
still  the  head  of  a  firm.  And  sometimes  he  would  stroll 
alone  on  the  terraces  or  about  the  country  roads,  or  shool 
small  birds  with  a  fowling-piece,  causing  a  lively  struggle 
in  Grand'mere's  mind  between  regret  for  the  fate  of  the 
birds  and  gratification  at  her  sou's  diversion.  The  women 
worked  everlastingly,  keeping  time  to  Madame's  lamenta- 
tions, or  Grand'mere's  praises  and  thanksgivings  and 
sparkling  range  of  observation  and  anecdote.     There  was 

B  2 


34  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

no  smoking,  drinking,  dicing,  or  card-playing ;  very  little 
even  of  the  feasting  which  then  went  on  elsewhere  through- 
out England  among  all  classes,  from  ministers  of  state 
down  to  plough-boys.  Indeed  the  prejudiced  people  of 
Sedge  Pond  esteemed  this  very  sobriety  as  an  important 
tittle  of  evidence  against  the  offenders,  and  often  discussed 
it  in  one  or  other  of  the  great  rooms  of  the  ale-house  as  an 
unmistakable  proof  that  the  French  family  were  guilty  of 
far  worse  practices. 

"  A  can  not  and  a  wunnot  drink  like  my  neebors,  be- 
cause when  ale's  in  wit's  out,  and  a  can  not  afford  to  miss 
wit  for  my  gunpowder  plots ;"  so  they  would  represent 
them  as  saying. 


CHAPTER  IY. 

THE   RECTOR   AND   HIS  HOUSEHOLD. 

The  Dupuys  had  now  lived  six  months  in  Sedge  Pond, 
tolerated,  but  looked  at  askance,  unmolested,  but  without 
having  received  a  word  of  welcome  as  Protestant  refugees. 
And  yet  there  was,  at  the  head  of  the  church  at  Sedge 
Pond,  a  stout  spiritual  captain  who  with  reason  reckoned 
himself  a  good  Christian  and  Protestant.  Mr.  Philip  Rolle, 
the  rector  of  the  parish,  was  one  of  the  best  and  most  in- 
fluential of  the  clergy  of  his  district.  He  was  respected  by 
all,  a  little  perhaps" because  of  his  good  birth,  private  for- 
tune, and  connection  with  the  great  Holies  of  the  Castle, 
but  still  more  because  of  the  manliness,  independence,  so- 
briety, and  morality  of  his  life.  And  this  was  something 
at  a  time  when  the  Church  often  scandalized  the  world  by 
having  in  its  ranks  bishops,  priests,  and  deacons  who  were 
ministers  to  iniquity  in  high  places,  and  time-servers  as 
loose  and  irregular  in  their  lives  as  the  grosser  members  of 
their  congregations.  Such  things,  when  they  did  not  ex- 
cite violent  antipathy,  were  regarded  with  indolent  indif- 
ference. Indeed,  the  memory  of  good  Bishop  Ken  and 
holy  George  Herbert,  and  the  priests  of  whom  they  were 
the  type,  seemed  to  have  died  out. 

Mr.  Philip  Rolle  was  a  proud,  opinionative  lender,  but  at 
the  same  time  a  conscientious,  active,  benevolent  magis- 
trate and  clergyman,  a  brave,  resolute  gentleman,  and  a 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  35 

generous  man  according  to  his  light.  He  never  missed 
preaching  sermons  like  military  orders,  and  read  the  serv- 
ice, whether  well  or  ill,  in  winter's  frost  and  summer's 
sultriness.  He  rode  into  the  thick  of  mobs  and  quelled 
them,  perhaps  more  by  his  undaunted  aristocratic  features 
than  his  ready  riding-whip,  which,  it  must  be  confessed,  he 
was  by  no  means  slow  to  wield  when  any  refractory  sheep 
was  straying  from  the  flock.  He  would  undoubtedly  have 
refused  to  whistle  the  Word  of  God  through  a  key-hole,  as 
he  denounced  and  stormed  at  simony ;  and  his  hands,  hu- 
manly speaking,  were  clean,  and  his  heart  pure.  But  he 
was,  notwithstanding  all  this,  as  fierce  and  fanatical  as  a 
Pharisee,  without  a  Pharisee's  hypocrisy.  He  would  have 
objected  to  a  dissenter  and  a  democrat  more  than  to  an 
unbeliever  and  a  tyrant,  for  the  one  he  regarded  as  a 
masked,  the  other  as  an  open  enemy. 

Thus  the  rector  had  been  vexed  when  the  Dupuys  in- 
vaded his  parish  and  accomplished  a  settlement  in  it.  He 
was  not  ignorant,  like  many  of  his  parishioners,  of  their 
claims  on  his  consideration  and  hospitality  as  fellow-Prot- 
estants who  had  suffered  in  the  cause  of  religious  liberty. 
But  he  ignored  them  as  long  as  possible,  for  he  looked 
upon  them  as  perilous  neighbors  and  their  views  as  dan- 
gerous stuff.  He  was  without  doubt  a  Protestant,  firmly 
denying  Roman  Catholic  supremacy,  and  boldly  confessing 
and  abjuring  Roman  Catholic  corruption  and  error.  Had 
he  lived  a  little  earlier,  and  had  rectors  gone  to  the  Tower 
with  bishops,  he  would  without  fail  have  gone  to  the  Tower. 
But  as  it  was,  he  had  no  regard  for  factious  subjects,  and 
his  gorge  rose  at  the  French,  whether  Protestant  or  Papist. 
He  classed  the  French  refugees  naturalized  in  England 
with  the  receivers  of  the  royal  bounty  who  paid  it  back  in 
intrigue,  conspiracy,  and  enthusiastic  imposture.  It  was  to 
no  purpose,  so  far  as  Mr.  Philip  Kolle  and  vehement  En- 
glishmen like  him  were  concerned,  that  the  French  churches 
in  London  and  elsewhere  denounced  and  repudiated  such 
evil  courses,  and  mourned  that  the  actors  in  them  were 
generally  taken  as  the  representatives  of  their  sect  and  na- 
tion. The  rector  was  inclined  to  look  on  the  Dupuys  as 
more  distasteful  and  troublesome  parishioners  than  his  old 
plagues,  the  meddling  and  leveling  family  of  the  Gages  of 
the  Mall,  who   were   at  least    the   spawn   of  an   English 


36  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

brood,   and   whose  vices   and   errors  were   those   of  En- 


gland 


Mr.  Philip  Rolle,  as  was  fitting  in  those  republican  times, 
kept  a  great  deal  of  state,  including  a  family  chariot  and  a- 
black  servant.  He  had  been  rather  lucky  in  his  matrimo- 
nial venture,  for  Madam  Rolle  was  a  presentable  woman, 
fair  and  fat.  She  believed  in  her  Bible,  her  husband,  her 
children,  and  "  The  County  Chronicle."  She  was  a  good, 
commonplace,  shallow  woman,  who  had  known  few  cares 
or  sorrows,  and  was  entirely  overshadowed  by  the  superior 
intellect  and  will  of  her  husband.  True,  she  put  forth  her 
whole  energy,  such  as  it  was,  and  labored  diligently  in  her 
small  calling,  in  order  that  nothing  should  be  wanting  in 
her  housewifery.  Their  family  consisted  of  one  son  and 
two  daughters.  Captain  Philip  Rolle,  at  the  date  of  our 
story,  was  in  the  army,  and  engaged  in  the  American  war. 
He  was  the  very  idol  of  his  lather's  heart,  and  was  report- 
ed to  be  a  gallant  officer  and  a  promising  young  man. 
Madam  Rolle,  while  she  contrived  that  she  should  be  the 
most  notable  woman  in  the  parish,  seemed  also  to  have  de- 
termined that  her  two  grown-up  daughters,  Dorothy,  and 
Camilla,  should  never  put  their  high-heeled  feet  to  the 
ground,  or  soil  the  rosy  tips  of  their  fingers,  which  their 
mittens  left  exposed,  save  for  their  own  special  pleasure. 
This  mode  of  upbringing  was,  of  course,  expected  to  render 
them  all  the  better  fitted  for  the  certain,  speedy,  and  high 
promotion  to  which  their  transcendent  merits  entitled 
them,  and  were  sure  to  command  for  them.  And  since  the 
rector  had  a  hand  in  the  polemics  of  his  day  and  a  seat  on 
the  bench,  he  was  too  busy  a  man  to  think  the  question  of 
women's  education  of  so  much  consequence,  that  he  should 
interfere  with  the  training  of  his  daughters.  Reprobate 
parsons  of  the  Lawrence  Sterne  stamp  would  interfere,  and 
be  very  much  set  on  their  Lyds  speaking  French  and  danc- 
ing minuets,  Avith  the  airs  and  graces  of  ma'mselles;  but 
righteous  parsons,  like  Mr.  Philip  Rolle,  left  the  reading 
and  the  writing  of  their  daughters,  as  well  as  the  cooking 
and  the  working,  to  their  mothers  and  to  nature.  lie  who 
was  a  lion  abroad  was,  in  this  respect,  a  lamb  at  home. 
Thus  Dorothy  and  Camilla  had,  perhaps,  the  best  chance 
in  England,  if  it  were  not  frustrated,  under  Providence,  by 
some  sense  and  virtue  in  their  own  hearts,  of  being  most 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  3 


h 


selfish,  uncultivated  girls,  full  of  affectations,  extravagances, 
and  passions,  strong  as  in  children. 

The  two  girls,  plump  and  cherry-cheeked,  were  puffed, 
powdered,  and  patched  after  the  best  mode,  and  lolled  and 
yawned,  with  their  lap-dogs  on  then*  knees,  while  black 
Jasper  was  actually  employed  to  fan  them  in  the  hot 
weather.  But  when  the  wind  or  their  humor  changed, 
they  would  walk  about  with  their  riding-skirts,  used  as 
wa Iking  -  dresses,  and  the  long  trains  drawn  through  the 
pocket-holes.  And  thus  they  would  tramp  through  dust 
and  mire  to  the  next  market-town  or  the  next  country- 
house,  in  search  of  adventure  and  diversion.  They  were 
not  over-particular  as  to  the  kind ;  and  sometimes  they 
would  succeed  in  coaxing  then-  father  to  mount  one  or  oth- 
er on  a  chariot  horse,  while  he  would  accompany  them  him- 
self, seated  erectly  and  stately  on  another,  Black  Jasper 
riding  behind,  with  his  knees  drawn  up  to  the  crown  of 
his  head.  For  a  whole  dim  October  day,  or  white  Febru- 
ary one,  they  would  go  about  thus,  spurring  and  clattering. 

Mr.  Philip  Rolle  was  not  one  of  those  men  who  fight  un- 
der women's  colors.  He  did  not  even  dream  of  using  his 
ladies  as  helpmeets  in  his  office,  though  the  practice  Avas 
ancient  enough,  and  might  have  pleased  a  man  who  Avas 
conservative  and  opposed  to  novelties.  In  his  own  indul- 
gent, courteous,  autocratical  way  he  was  strong  on  the  phys- 
ical and  mental  inferiority  of  women,  and  their  inevitable 
dependence  upon  man,  and  he  enforced  his  notions  by  all 
sound  laws,  human  and  divine.  One  of  the  innovations 
which  specially  offended  and  disgusted  him  in  the  new  doc- 
trines which  John  Wesley  and  Fletcher  of  Madeley  had  giv- 
en themselves  over  to  spread,  was  that  of  women  preaching 
and  teaching,  and  taking  it  upon  them  to  judge  tor  them- 
selves against  the  plain  doctrines  of  revealed  truth. 

He  did  not  employ  Madam  Rolle  in  parochial  work  be- 
yond the  superintendence  of  the  making  of  a  particular  pos- 
set, or  the  placing  the  contents  of  her  larder  at  hi-  disposal 
for  his  respectable  poor,  whom  he  wished  to  feed  and  clothe 
by  rule  and  measure,  though  yet  with  a  certain  faithfulness 
and  liberality,  for  to  the  poor  who  had  become  so  through 
their  own  deeds  and  deserts  he  was  a  stem  jailer  and  task- 
master. Dorothy  and  Camilla  might  perhaps  languishingly 
or  pertly  distribute  pence  on  days  of  doles  or  church  i'esti- 


38  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

vals,  but  the  rector  scorned  female  assistance  of  any  more 
practical  character.  The  idea  of  women,  whom  he  acknowl- 
edged as  rational  beings  called  to  love  and  good  works, 
being  employed  in  ministrations  of  education,  enlighten-, 
ment,  or  consolation  in  the  best  sense,  would,  in  his  idea, 
have  been  simply  to  strike  at  the  very  root  of  Protestant- 
ism. He  would  liave  mourned  over  it  as  a  return  to  the 
ascetic  sentimental  sisterhoods  of  Roman  Catholicism,  with 
their  famished  humanity  and  their  spurious  pietism,  or,  at 
the  best,  as  a  drifting  into  the  eccentric,  unorthodox,  lawless 
by-roads  of  Methodism.  But  Dorothy  and  Camilla  were 
honest  and  modest,  innocent  in  their  ignorance  and  their 
respectfulness  to  their  father,  and  their  affection  to  then- 
mother.  They  did  not  wholly  want  parts ;  at  least  they 
could  not  contribute  to  the  evening  cheerfulness  by  song, 
riddle,  and  game,  and  they  knew  the  fashions  sufficiently  to 
spoil  their  complexions  and  injure  their  health  a  little  by 
washes.  What  more  could  be  expected  of  the  frail  things, 
since  it  was  taken  for  granted  that  they  also  went  to 
church  when  the  weather  was  not  too  inclement,  said  their 
prayers,  and  resisted  temptation  in  the  shape  of  private  ac- 
quaintance with  profligate  young  Squire  Thornhills,  and 
such-like  scandalous  company  ? 

The  rectory  women  had  so  little  fault  to  find  with  their 
world  and  its*  morals,  that  it  never  entered  into  the  light 
vaporish  heads  of  Dorothy  and  Camilla  that  they  were  ex- 
pected to  be  more  than  young  ladies  of  breeding,  of  a  little 
beauty  and  some  accomplishments.  Time,  if  it  hung  heav- 
ily on  their  hands,  was  to  be  got  rid  of  as  they  could  best 
contrive  for  their  own  content,  and  the  maintenance  of 
their  very  intermittent  and  wavering  sprightliness,  which, 
as  was  the  fashion  then,  alternated  with  fits  of  lowness  and 
spleen,  when  they  would  lie  abed  half-days  at  a  time,  and 
fling  their  shoes  at  Black  Jasper.  But  all  this,  of  course, 
was  done  in  subordination  to  the  great  aim  of  their  own 
and  their  mother's  lives,  that  in  time  they  should  make 
good  matches.  The  sun  of  fortune  had  shone  upon  their 
horizon  when  their  distant  kinswoman  and  careless, capri- 
cious patroness,  Lady  Rolle,  held  racket  at  the  Castle ;  and 
their  fondest  hope  and  wish  now  was  to  be  invited  to  spend 
a  season  of  frantic  dissipation  under  her  ladyship's  game- 
bird  wing  up  in  town. 


TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  39 

Nothing  had  more  puzzled,  astounded,  and  in  a  sort  ag- 
grieved Madam  in  the  whole  course  of  her  sheltered,  shal- 
low life,  than  the  disappointing  experience  she  had  had  of 
her  old  school-fellow  and  companion,  Madam  Gage,  of  the 
Mall.  While  yet  a  woman  of  youth,  beauty,  parts,  birth, 
and  fortune,  this  lady  had  risen  up  and  resisted  the  impos- 
ing array  of  custom  and  authority,  which  she  had  been 
taught  to  hold  in  devoted  esteem  and  veneration.  She 
had  declared  that  there  was  a  higher  law  and  a  greater 
authority  on  her  side,  which  she  dared  not  gainsay  or  con- 
tradict, and  which  commanded  her  to  come  out  of  her 
family  and  circle,  and  follow  her  own  course.  Hardships, 
reproaches,  mockery,  contumely,  and  condemnation  had 
not  moved  her.  She  had  separated  herself  from  her 
"  world,"  and  stood  alone,  and,  what  was  worse,  she  had 
entered  into  alliance  with  men  and  women  not  of  Madam 
Rolle's  kind,  and  who  were  unlike  her  in  thought,  speech, 
and  habit.  Madam  Gage  had  worn  plain  clothes,  fed  on 
homely  food,  risen  up  early,  lain  down  late,  and  had  estab- 
lished and  maintained  a  household  according  to  her  own 
strange  independent  rules.  Yea,  she  had  even  gone 
abroad,  and  labored  like  an  ordained  priest,  except  that 
her  labors  were  all  among  the  poorest,  most  ignorant,  and 
most  depraved,  till  she  had  wedded  Mr.  Gage,  of  the  Mall, 
one  of  the  few  persons  of  her  rank  infected  with  her  craze. 
She  had  lived  and  worked  with  him,  called  all  things  by 
new  names,  and  had  founded  every  kind  of  unheard-of 
and  uncalled-for  institution.  The  husband  and  wife  had 
stirred  up  the  meanest  working  man  and  woman  to  try  for 
themselves  this  new  version  of  religion,  and  to  work  it  out 
according  to  their  circumstances  and  capacities — above  all, 
according  to  divine  gifts  profanely  accorded  to  them. 
These  senseless  and  audacious  subversions  of  duty  ami 
harmony  had  been  thorns  in  the  flesh  of  Mr.  Rolle,  and 
had  been  carried  on,  to  Madam  Rolle's  indignant  marvel 
and  dismay,  under  the  rector's  very  nose,  and  by  individ- 
uals still  in  communion  with  his  Church. 

Yet  Madam  Gage,  apart  from  her  lamentable  "  perver- 
sion," did  not  fail  in  any  of  the  relations  of  life,  but  was 
so  true  a  daughter,  so  kind  a  sister,  and  so  considerate 
and  constant  a  friend  and  mistress,  wife  and  mother,  that 
her  kindred  forgot  and  forgave  the  disgrace  and  injury  she 


40  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

» 

had  done  them  by  her  new  profession.  They  restored  her 
to  their  good  graces,  and  re-installed  her  in  the  place  of 
the  willing  working  member  of  the  house,  on  whom,  even 
though  married,  all  troublesome  obligations  fall,  and  are 
cheerfully  accepted,  and  patiently  and  faithfully  fulfilled. 
And  to  the  day  of  her  death  Madam  Gage  had  never  ap- 
peared to  Madam  Rolle  with  the  bearing  of  a  conscious 
offender,  or  even  of  a  presuming  woman.  In  her  stuff 
gown,  linen  neckerchief,  and  muffling  head-dress  of  frills 
and  bands,  Madam  Gage  had  looked  the  same  grand, 
handsome,  frank,  high-spirited  woman  she  had  looked 
when  she  went,  powdered  as  a  marchioness,  with  brocade 
over  her  hoop  and  a  pearl  drop  at  her  throat.  If  there 
was  any  change,  it  was  a  greater  depth  in  her  grey  eyes,  a 
sweeter  curve  in  her  full,  firm  lip,  as  though  peace  and 
rest  had  come  out  of  the  strife  and  toil  she  had  chosen, 
and  had  lent  serenity  to  her  beauty. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  FLAG  OF  TRUCE,  AND  II0AV  IT  FARED. 

I  wish  you  to  give  me  your  company  in  paying  a 
visit,"  said  Mr.  Philip  Rolle  to  his  wife  and  daughters,  one 
day,  as  he  entered  the  parlor  with  its  Indian  hangings, 
worked  chair-covers,  and  dragon  china.  Madam,  in  a 
sack,  sat  poring  over  her  recipe-book,  and  Dorothy  and 
Camilla  sat  with  crossed  hands  and  made  faces  in  an  oppo- 
site mirror. 

"  Where  to,  papa  ?"  cried  the  girls  in  a  breath,  jumping 
up.  "  You  must  tell  us,  that  we  may  know  what  to  wear. 
Any  kind  of  gadding  is  better  than  moping  here." 

"With  all  the  pleasure  in  life,  girls;  we  are  delighted 
to  go  abroad  with  papa,"  put  in  Madam,  carefully.  "  Is 
the  chariot  to  be  had  out,  sir  ?" 

It  is  to  be  noted  that  Madam  did  not  stand  in  awe  of 
her  husband.  She  loved  him  too  well  for  what  is  gener- 
ally understood  by  that  phrase,  and  perfect  love  in  this  re- 
lation, as  in  every  other,  casteth  out  fear.  She  compre- 
hended his  character  so  well  by  long,  fond  poring  over 
him,  that  she  read  what  was  in  his  mind  as  readily  as  a 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  41 

much  cleverer  woman  would  have  read  it,  and  she  set  her- 
self to  humor  him.  She  was  aware  that,  great  man  as  he 
was,  he  was  not  superior  to  keeping  his  family  in  the  dark 
till  the  last  moment  as  to  his  intentions,  and  thus  exercis- 
ing them  in  blind  obedience.  And  he  -  now  answered 
briefly,  "  No,  there  is  no  need  for  the  chariot ;  the  attend- 
ance of  Black  Jasper  will  suffice." 

"Surely  you  might  tell  its  more,  papa,"  implored  the 
girls,  half  whimpering.  "  We  do  not  know  whether  we 
ought  to  put  on  our  gauzes  and  mantles,  or  our  modes 
and  paduasoys." 

"  Either,  my  daughters  ;  the  question  is  not  worth  a 
wise  woman's  consideration.  Granting  that  the  wise 
woman's  clothing  was  silk  and  purple,  I  dare  avow  she 
put  it  on  at  once  and  did  not  weigh  it  in  the  balance,"  as- 
serted the  provoking  man,  who  yet  hardly  ever  proposed 
to  his  daughters  any  higher  questions. 

Madam  Rolle  hastened  to  step  in  to  still  the  little  fer- 
ment and  to  dissipate  the  perplexity  which  was  already 
causing  pouts  and  taps  of  the  heels  on  the  floor.  "  I  am 
certain  my  Dorothy  and  my  Camilla  will  be  charmed  to 
have  an  opportunity  of  seeing  company  with  their  papa 
and  me,  whether  they  are  to  be  in  their  mantles  or  their 
paduasoys.  I  dare  say,  my  dear,  we  have  to  go  no  farther 
than  the  ale-house,  to  see  some  travelers  who  are  baiting 
their  horses  there,  or  have  broken  down,  or  fear  to  go  on 
and  be  benighted.  Only,  sir,  if  we  are  to  offer  them  our 
hospitality,  I  hope  you  will  acquaint  me  in  time,  as  I  can 
not  be  provided  with  what  I  need  any  nearer  than  Red- 
ham.  Surely  my  Lady  Rolle  and  her  sons  can  not  have 
come  suddenly  to  the  Castle  without  previous  warning,  or 
without  the  girls  seeing  the  coach  and  the  riders,  when 
they  have  sat  in  the  window  there  and  diverted  them- 
selves counting  every  cart,  wagon,  and  pack-horse  that 
has  passed  this  morning." 

"No, Lady  Rolle  is  not  at  the  Castle,  that  I  have  heard 
of,"  her  lord  and  master  assured  her,  "and  the  object  of 
the  call  is  none  so  pleasant  that  I  should  be  in  haste  to  an- 
nounce it.  I  think  it  is  ft  we  should  wait  on  these 
French  cattle  at  Shottery  Cottage." 

"Where  you  think  it  right  to  go,  my  dear  Philip,  T  am 
ready  and  willing  to  attend  you;  but,  sir,  do  you  think  it 


42  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

equally  safe  for  the  girls  ?"  hesitated  Madam,  for  once  in 
her  life  doubtful  of  Mr.  Philip  Rolle's  complete  discretion. 

"  Why,  there  is  no  fear  these  people  will  kidnap  our 
idle  lasses,  and  send  them  over  the  seas  to  convents  to 
learn  to  be  useful  there,  especially  when  their  own  women 
have  preferred  being  put  into  penitentkories." 

"  Never  mind  papa,  girls ;  he  has  no  real  intention  of 
depreciating  his  own,  or  exalting  foreigners  over  true 
Britons." 

"  You  are  right  there,  Millie  ;  but  if  we  are  to  do  the 
thing  at  all,  we  had  better  do  it  handsomely.  These  folk 
have  a  chit  like  ours,  whom  we  may  as  well  notice  if  we 
notice  any  of  them ;  it  is  probable  she  is  the  most  harm- 
less of  the  lot." 

"  If  you  please,  sir,  we  have  seen  her,"  said  Dorothy, 
glibly;  "a  white-faced  girl,  who  looks  as  if  she  had  the 
vapors  every  day.  She  sails  abroad  in  silks  ;  and — what 
do  you  think  ? — carries  porringers  with  her  own  hand,  in 
company  with  a  little  old  witch,  who  has  always  a  red- 
headed stick — the  same  who  threw  Goody  Gubbins  into 
fits  with  her  sorceries." 

"  Never  mind,  child,  she'll  not  bewitch  you  when  I  am 
there  to  break  the  charm ;  and  she'll  proselytize  long  be- 
fore she  proselytizes  Goody  Gubbins."  Thus  the  rector 
cut  her  short,  objecting  to  petty  gossip. 

"  I'm  not  affrighted,"  Camilla  joined  in,  a  little  loftily. 
"  And  I  wish  above  all  things  to  hear  the  French  proph- 
ets." 

"  What !  do  you  wish  to  hear  them  prophesy,  Millie  ?" 
argued  her  mother  in  amazement.  "  I  hope,  sir,  they'll  do 
nothing  of  the  kind." 

"  I  hope  not,"  said  Mr.  Philip  Rolle,  quietly  agreeing 
with  his  wife ;  "  but  you  need  be  under  no  apprehension, 
lor  if  they  do  I  shall  instantly  leave  the  house,"  he  con- 
cluded, with  an  animation  which  sounded  very  much  as  if 
it  would  be  rather  a  relief  than  otherwise  to  shake  the  dust 
from  his  feet  against  the  strangers. 

"  I  never  stood  and  heard  any  offense  of  the  sort,"  con- 
tinued  Madam,  excited  and  flurried  in  her  turn,  "  unless  it 
was  Lucy  Gage  once,  when  she  came  off  her  pillion  and  ad- 
dressed the  crowd  which  Lady  Rolle  was  going  to  treat  to 
a  harvest  supper.     I  was  in  the  chariot,  and  Dapple  had 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  43 

cast  a  shoe,  and  I  was  detained  in  spite  of  myself.  I'd  lief- 
er have  walked  home  barefoot.  All  I  could  do  was  to  turn 
away  my  head  and  think  to  stop  my  ears  when  I  saw  a 
gentlewoman  so  eaten  up  with  pride  and  false  religion  as 
to  deliver  a  homily  to  rustics  and  gaping  clowns  in  the 
open  road  before  Shn  Hart's,  the  farrier's.  Yet  I  protest 
all  I  heard  was  no  worse  and  no  more  untrue  than  that 
there  was  One  who  gave  them  all  things ;  and  that  they 
should  remember  his  great  harvest  gathered  in  by  the 
angels,  and  should  behave  godly,  righteously,  and  soberly 
at  their  feast.  But  even  if  they  forgot  Him,  there  was 
One  who  remembered  them  in  pity,  not  in  anger ;  who  was 
ready  to  save  them  to  the  uttermost,  and  to  pluck  them 
like  brands  from  the  burning,  even  at  the  last  moment,  if 
they  but  willed  Him  to  save  them." 

"  Yes,"  said  the  rector,  "  and  the  laborers  went  out 
of  her  sight  and  made  themselves  beastly  drunk,  and  rioted, 
and  put  a  torch  to  Farmer  Clere's  stack-yard,  excusing 
themselves  on  the  ground  that  he  was  not  a  vessel  of  grace 
to  be  saved  without  works  as  they  were ;  and  all  because 
a  mad  woman  forgot  huniilitv  and  restraint,  and  wrested 
the  Scriptures  to  her  own  and  to  her  neighbors'  destruc- 
tion." 

"  Alake  !  Dolly,  Millie,  hear  what  your  good  father  says, 
and  take  heed  in  time ;  for  I  knew  Lucy  Gage  when  she 
was  as  renowned  for  her  modesty  and  sensibility  as  for  her 
brave  spirit  and  temper.  And  now  that  she  is  dead  and 
gone,  I  doubt  not,  poor  soul !  she  meant  no  harm ;  only  she 
was  led  away  and  blinded  and  besotted  by  wild  views,  as 
her  husband  and  her  son  are  to  this  day." 

The  girls  did  not  seem  much  impressed  by  this  appeal, 
but  stood  with  round  eyes  of  expectation  and  curiosity. 

"I  know  why  our  Millie  wants  so  much  to  hear  the 
French  prophets,"  Dorothy  said,  putting  herself  forward 
to  communicate  information.  "  We  had  it  from  Mrs.  Trout- 
beck,  my  lady's  maid,  when  she  was  down  at  the  Castle  for 
the  catgut  to  make  the  bell-ribbons,  that  my  lady  bought 
their  blessing,  and  won  a  hundred  guineas  at  faro,  and 
heard  good  news  of  Mr.  Dick's  ship  within  the  month." 

Mr.  Philip  Kolle  frowned.  He  hated  to  speak  evil  of 
dignities,  and  he  was  conservative  ami  aristocral  to  the 
backbone.      He  loved  the  very  name  of  Kolle,  as  Dr.  John- 


44  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

son  loved  that  of  Beauclerc.  He  was  not  only  a  kinsman 
of  the.  house,  hut  he  had  heen  governor  of  my  lady's  sons, 
who  were  his  juniors,  in  the  old  days  before  he  succeeded 
to  the  living  of  Sedge  Pond.  He  had  sat  at  the  Castle 
hoard  on  a  different  footing  from  that  of  most  governors, 
having  heen  an  honored  friend  of  the  clever,  witty,  and 
witless  lady  of  the  Castle.  The  honor  of  the  family  was 
thus  doubly  in  his  keeping,  and  was  doubly  dear  to  him, 
but  he  could  not  let  the  intimation  pass  without  an  expres- 
sion of  his  disapprobation. 

"  My  lady  will  have  her  folly,"  he  said,  dryly ;  "  which 
doth  not  concern  us  mucb,  save  that  we  would  prefer  that 
it  did  not  tamper  with  things  sacred.  When  all  is  done, 
it  seemeth  to  me  that  it  should  be  the  part  of  honest  peo- 
ple, who  hold  that  blood  is  thicker  than  water,  not  to  prate 
of  servants'  idle  stories,  and  trumpet  the  follies  of  their 
superiors." 

Dorothy  stood  corrected  like  a  naughty  child,  and,  with 
all  her  womanly  growth  and  fine-ladyism,  put  her  finger 
into  her  mouth. 

Again  Madam  interposed,  and  turned  the  conversation : 

"  Mr.  Rolle,  I  am  in  a  quandary  about  these  French 
neighbors.  I  did  learn  French,  along  with  drilling  and 
the  use  of  the  globes,  for  a  quarter  or  two  at  the  Miss 
Cromwells'  school  at  Huntingdon  ;  but  'tis  so  long  ago, 
that  I  am  under  an  apprehension  I  have  forgotten  every 
word.  Indeed,  I  shall  not  attempt  to  speak  it,  and  I  think 
I  had  better  tell  you  beforehand,  lest  you,  who  are  such 
a  scholar  yourself,  should  be  disappointed  and  shamed  with 


me." 


"  I  shall  not  be  disappointed,  dame,  and  shamed  I  need 
not  be,  unless  it  be  on  my  own  account,  since,  though  you 
are  good  enough  to  call  me  a  scholar,  and  though  the  lan- 
guage was  mightily  affected  at  the  Castle  in  my  time,  and 
I  did  then  acquire  some  skill  in  it,  I  doubt  me  much  wheth- 
er  I  could  pass  muster  after  so  great  an  interval,  unless 
before  such  a  connoisseur  as  you.  But  why  distress  our 
selves  with  the  supposed  obligation,  since  we  haAre  a  couple 
of  daughters,  new  off  the  irons  of  polite  accomplishment, 
ready  to  relieve  us,  and  show  off  lor  us  in  all  the  languages 
under  the  sun." 

"Papa,  papa !"  cried  Dorothy,  "how  can  you  propose 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  45 

such  a  thing,  when  you  know  that  last  spring,  when  wc 
rode  into  Redham,  you  forbade  us  to  learn  Italian  because 
old  Madame  Viol  had  been  an  opera-dancer,  and  you  said 
you  did  not  affect  the  opera,  and  did  not  care  for  us  pick- 
ing up  its  jargon." 

"  And  you  took  us  away  from  Monsieur  Delaine,"  chimed 
in  Camilla,  "just  when  we  were  getting  into  the  fairy  tales, 
and  the  contre-dances,  because  he  sent  Dolly  such  a  set 
of  ribbons  as  she  had  longed  for  on  her  birthday,  and  in- 
structed her  to  fib  wdien  you  questioned  her  about  it,  and 
lied  directly  when  you  taxed  him  with  it." 

Thus  Dorothy  and  Camilla  declined  the  appointment, 
and  vindicated  their  refusal. 

"  And  suppose  these  Shottery  Cottage  gentry  are  also 
among  the  prophets,  and  begin  to  prophesy  in  their  own 
language,  it  will  be  speaking  in  an  unknown  tongue  to 
you,"  suggested  the  rector. 

The  two  girls  looked  blank  at  the  self-evident  proposi- 
tion. 

"  Will  my  dear  girls  never  be  made  sensible  that  their 
papa  loves  to  joke  with  them  ?•"  remonstrated  Madam. 

"And  softly,  Mistress  Dorothy  and  Mistress  Camilla,  I 
should  as  soon  look  to  see  Black  Jasper  do  a  turn  of  hard 
work  for  his  diet  and  his  livery,  as  to  find  misses  of  any 
kind  prove  that  they  had  not  picked  their  father's  pockets 
by  putting  into  the  simplest  practice  the  lessons  on  which 
he  has  spent  a  power  of  money." 

The  party  started  at  last,  and  as  they  were  complying 
with  a  professional  duty  and  form  of  society,  they  were 
marshaled  in  order.  His  Reverence  and  Madam  walked 
first,  she  quite  stately  in  her  parson's  wife's  hood  and  pat- 
tens, for  the  streets  of  the  village  were  rarely  passable  even 
in  dry  weather,  and  he  stalking  gravely,  in  his  cauliflower 
wig  and  black  stockings.  Dorothy  and  Camilla,  having 
barely  got  over  the  grievance  of  not  being  allowed  time  to 
decide  "between  their  mantles  and  their  paduasoys,  went 
quarreling  all  the  way  as  to  the  right  of  each  to  a  single 
extraordinary  crimson  parasol,  such  as  Chinamen  may  be 
seen  to  carry  nowadays.  It  was  a  cast-off  parasol  of  Lady 
Rolle's,  the  only  one  in  these  parts,  ami  a  great  curiosity. 
Behind  them  again  came  Black  Jasper,  to  whom  and  to  his 
master  it  was  a  misfortune  that  he  did  every  act  of  his  life 


46  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

with  exaggerated  solemnity.  He  was  a  simple,  timid,  at- 
tached fellow,  with  a  great  gaping  mouth,  rolling  eyes,  and 
projecting  ears  which  were  like  ebony  handles  to  the  ebony 
casket  of  his  body  in  its  green  and  yellow  livery.  His  ex- 
cessive solemnity  and  nervous  fear  of  Mr.  Philip  Rolle  were 
his  chief  faults.  Why  there  should  have  been  such  an  ele- 
ment of  the  ludicrous  in  the  profound  gravity  and  impor- 
tance with  which  Black  Jasper  stepped  with  long  strides 
while  he  carried  Madam's  Bible  or  her  basket,  or  a  cudgel 
for  the  presumed  defense  of  the  ladies,  it  would  be  difficult 
to  say ;  but  there  it  was,  and  Mr.  Philip  Rolle,  a  sensitive 
man,  was  keenly  alive  to  it.  But  Black  Jasper  was  an  in- 
stitution of  the  period,  which  could  not  be  got  rid  of  with- 
out barbarous  injury  to  the  poor  fellow,  who  was  so  far 
from  home,  and  so  incapable  of  procuring  his  livelihood  by 
his  own  exertions.  Black  Jaspers  were  fixtures  and  heir- 
looms then,  and  it  was  a  lax  and  benevolent  as  well  as  a 
vain  element  in  men,  which  made  them  adopt  them.  Be- 
sides, Black  Jasper  was  Captain  Philip's  spoil,  whom  he 
had  brought  home  after  one  of  his  campaigns,  and  it  would 
have  been  a  slight  to  the  beloved  phoenix  of  the  house  had 
the  family  turned  the  negro  adrift.  Mr.  Philip  Rolle  aimed 
at  being  just  to  all  men,  and  a  connection  with  his  son, 
however  slight,  was  the  greatest  claim  to  his  regard.  But 
Black  Jasper's  inveterate,  uncontrollable  terror  of  his  firm, 
sharp  face,  his  clear  ringing  voice,  and  his  abrupt  authori- 
tative manner,  irked  and  provoked  him.  The  negro,  all  the 
while,  was  like  a  docile,  tender  dog,  and  he  but  served  his 
"  Massa's  Massa"  the  more  sedulously  because  of  his  des- 
perate dread. 

The  Dupuys  were  all  at  home,  the  women  being  to- 
gether in  their  room.  Monsieur  was  sent  for  to  receive 
and  meet  the  advances  of  the  parish  clergyman,  and  he  at 
once  obeyed  the  summons. 

Never,  perhaps,  Avas  there  a  worse  assorted  company, 
and  Grand'mere  alone  of  all  its  members  was  perfectly 
composed  and  at  her  ease.  Indeed,  at  the  beginning  of 
the  visit,  she  looked  glad  and  gracious  as  well  as  grateful. 
But  there  was  little  wonder  that  Madame  Dupuy,  distrust- 
ing the  English  as  she  did,  and  bearing  a  grudge  at  all 
mankind,  in  her  gloomy  pre-occupations  over  Huguenot 
sufferings,  should  raise  her  neck  out  of  the  folds  of  her 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  47 

fichu  like  a  bundle  of  saffron  bones,  and  look  down  stiffly 
and  sourly  upon  the  visitors.  And  there  was  just  as  little 
wonder  that  Yolande,  though  yearning  painfully  after 
something  like  communion  with  companions  such  as  her- 
self, should  draw  shyly  to  her  grandmother's  side,  and  only 
look  sadly  and  strangely  at  the  giddy,  tricked-out,  affected 
figures  of  Dorothy  and  Camilla  Kolle.  They,  on  their  part 
again,  glanced  contemptuously  round  the  bare,  sombre 
room,  which  every  way  contrasted  with  their  ideas  of 
French  luxury  and  gayety.  But  Monsieur,  though  bland 
as  a  Frenchman,  showed  no  pleasure  at  the  sight  of  his 
guests,  nor  gave  any  token  of  a  wish  to  encourage  and  im- 
prove their  acquaintance.  He  was  scrupulously  civil,  he 
bowed  low,  and  was  more  like  a  grand  bourgeois,  with  his 
noblesse  des  cloches,  than  ever,  but  he  did  not  grasp  Mr. 
Philip  Rolle's  right  hand  of  fellowship  very  cordially.  On 
the  contrary,  there  was  a  covert  tone  of  sarcasm  and  of- 
fense in  Monsieur's  bearing,  which  the  rector  was  not  slow 
to  perceive  and  understand. 

The  conversation  was  conducted  in  fair  English,  so  far 
as  Monsieur  and  Grand'mere  were  concerned.  Yolande 
was  dumb.  Madame  Dupuy  employed  her  broken  English 
in  making  harsh,  scornful  replies  which  quite  annihilated 
the  simple  phrases  with  which  Madam  Kolle  thought  to 
make  conversation  at  all  times  and  places.  And  not  only 
this.  To  the  still  greater  dismay  and  indignation  of  the 
rector's  lady,  Madame  was  guilty  of  giving  forth  wither- 
ing insinuations  regarding  the  rector's  latitudinarianism, 
and  so  plain  and  direct  were  they,  though  in  halting  En- 
glish, that  even  innocent  Madam  Kolle  could  not  mistake- 
them. 

•  When  the  rector,  as  a  man  of  the  world  and  a  liberal 
Protestant  clergyman,  attempted  to  engage  Monsieur  in  a 
discussion  of  French  politics  and  the  general  prospects  of 
Protestantism  in  Europe,  Monsieur  answered  with  smiling 
references  to  the  exiled  royal  family,  whom  Mr.  Kolle  and 
his  college  of  Oxford  were  supposed  to  favor  without  hav- 
ing risen  and  restored  to  them  their  kingdom.  And  then 
he  went  on  to  speak  of  the  great  gulf  between  Calvinista 
and  Lutherans,  which  was  so  wide  that  the  Roman  Cath- 
olic bishops  who  had  presided  over  the  ceremony  of  bring- 
ing France  to  a  unanimity  of  faith  by  the  rough  eonver- 


-i 


48  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

sions  of  the  dragonnades,  had  offered  to  overlook  the  mild 
profession  of  the  last,  so  that  the  first  damnahle  heresy 
were  abjured. 

"Allans,  then,  Monsieur  the  rector,"  insisted  Monsieur,- 
with  a  willful  misconception,  "one  can  not  tell  whether  to 
reckon  the  Protestants  in  Europe  by  thousands  or  millions, 
seeing  that  the  Catholics  bear  no  enmity  to  your  pure 
form  and  simple  hierarchy — your  altars  and  saints'-days 
and  lord  bishops— that  they  regard  you  as  brothers,  in 

fact." 

At  the  same  time  Madame  Dupuy  and  Madam  Rolle 
were  at  still  greater  cross-purposes,  the  one  mortally  of- 
fending and  horrifying  the  other.     Madam  Rolle  had  be- 
gun by  the  simpering,  unsuspicious  inquiry  how  Madame 
Dupuy  had  liked  the  rector's  thesis  on  Sunday,  and  had 
proceeded  to  remark  that  her  good  man  was  acknowledged 
to  be  a  fine  scholar,  though  she  should  not  say  it.     This 
she  would  take  it  upon  her  to  say,  however,  that  he  prac- 
ticed what  he  preached,  that  there  was  not  a  better  living 
clergyman,  or  a  more  virtuous  gentleman  in  England,  and 
she  ought  to  know  his  private  worth  as  well  as  another. 
Moreover,  Madam  had  reason  to  believe  that  the  rector's 
theses  had  been  noted  and  admired  in  high  quarters,  and 
that  something  would  come  of  them,  as  something  ought 
to  come,  for  certainly  they  were  too  pious  and  eloquent  to 
be  wasted  on  an  ordinary  congregation  like  that  of  Sedge 
Pond.     And  did  not  Madame  think  that  the  music  of  the 
church  would  be  much  improved  when  the  pipe  and  tabor 
were  replaced  by  an  organ  such  as  Mr.  Handel  played  on  ? 
Lady  Rolle  and  others  of  the  quality  had  generously  con- 
sented to  subscribe  for  it  whenever  they  had  time  to  get 
up  the  subscription  and  could  spare  the  cash,  and  all  they 
had  now  to  do  was  to  settle  the  dispute  among  themselves 
as  to  which  of  them  should  superintend  the  building  of  the 
instrument  up  in  London. 

In  disposal  of  this  prattle,  Madame  caused  the  hairs  of 
Madam  Rolle's  head  to  stand  on  end  by  the  unheard-of 
presumption  and  effrontery  of  the  declaration  that  she  did 
not  like  the  theses  at  all.  They  might  be  very  clever,  ah  I 
very  clever,  but  she  had  not  been  accustomed  to  these  the* 
ses,  which  might  have  been  heathen  discourses.  She  had 
abandoned  her  country,  where  the  sun  shone  and  one  was 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  49 

warm  sometimes,  for  the  sake  of  the  preaching  which  bade 
dying  men  flee  to  the  shelter  of  the  Cross.  She  did  not 
comprehend  exactly  what  Madam  Rolle  wished  to  say  of 
her  husband.  As  for  the  music  of  the  church,  she  dared 
say  the  pipe  and  song  of  Sedge  Pond  might  be  very  good 
music,  she  was  no  judge  of  music ;  but  she  had  not  listen- 
ed with  pleasure  to  the  praises  of  God  since  she  heard  the 
sublime  psalms  of  Beze  swelling  through  the  hearts  of  a 
proscribed  assembly,  and  awaking  the  echoes  of  the  desert. 
Having  overthrown  and  trampled  upon  Madam  Rolle, 
Madame  Dupuy  crowned  her  enormities  by  intruding  into 
the  tete-d-tete  of  Monsieur  and  the  rector,  frowning  upon 
Monsieur  without  ceremony. 

"  Old,  oid,  Monsieur,  it  is  good  to  hear  you  on  orthodoxy 
of  creed  and  simplicity  of  worship,  you  who  have  ceased 
to  condemn  almost  any  deed  short  of  fire  and  murder. 
From  necessity,  my  dear  Grand'mere  ?  You  are  too  good, 
too  good,  for  a  mocker  like  Monsieur  your  son.  Bah  ! 
necessity  is  another  word  for  greed,  and  greed  is  sleeve  to 
sleeve  with  the  god  of  a  little  country  named  Canaan,  an 
adorable  god  which  called  itself  Moloch.  All  the  men  are 
infidels  nowadays.  They  do  not  deny  their  faith,  for 
why?  They  are  too  obstinate,  too  proud,  that  is  all. 
Which  of  them  would  die  for  it  ?  Which  of  them  would 
count  all  things  but  loss  for  it?  Count  all  tilings  but  loss! 
They,  trade  upon  it,  they  gain  money  by  it,  they  adopt 
another  country  and  another  creed,  they  lament  no  more 
on  the  anniversary  of  the  Revocation ;  they  are  consoled, 
they  are  rich  as  the  world  was  when  the  flood  came,  as 
Sodom  and  Gomorrah  were  till  the  fire  and  brimstone 
fell." 

The  woman  was  stark,  staring  mad:  could  there  be 
more  unmistakable  evidence  than  her  loud  railing  at  her 
lawful  husband,  who  Avas  taking  snuff,  imperturbably  ad- 
dressing her  as  "my  very  good  Philippine,"  and  imploring 
her,  without  empressement,  not  to  agitate  herself;  while 
she  faithfully  and  gently  paid  her  duty  to  the  individual 
whom  Madam  Rolle  hesitatingly  designated  the  "light- 
headed, aged  woman,  dressed  up  like  Madam's  young 
daughters,"  and  all  because  the  fine  old  Frenchwoman 
was  a  thousand  times  more  elegant  than  the  clumsy  young 
English  girls.     It  was  far  from  safe  company  for  them; 

C 


50  THE    UUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Madam  Rolle  wished  she  were  well  free  of  it,  for  she  could 
scarcely  conceive  that  the  French  prophets  could  be  more 
immoral,  though  they  might  be  more  blasjihemous.  And 
then  Dorothy  and  Camilla  were  there,  swallowing  every 
word  of  the  unseemly,  scandalous  defiance  ;  though  Mad- 
am herself  allowed  they  were  sometimes  slow  enough  to 
imbibe  wrhat  was  good  for  them. 

The  joy  of  Grand'mere's  hospitality  was  soon  extin- 
guished; but  she  commanded  herself  sufficiently  to  take 
part  in  the  conversation,  and  do  her  best  to  cover  the  rude- 
ness of  her  daughter-in-law,  and  the  but  half-concealed  cyn- 
icism of  her  son,  and  to  try,  by  her  own  sweet  intelligence 
and  bright  vivacity,  to  make  some  return  to  the  natives 
for  their  condescension,  besides  that  of  sullen  recrimination 
and  bitter  pleasantry.  And  here  Monsieur  her  son,  and 
Madame  her  daughter-in-law,  made  room  for  her  words, 
gave  them  respectful  attention,  with  just  the  faintest  qualm 
of  Madame's  self-righteousness,  and  the  slightest  hanging 
of  Monsieur's  worldly-wise,  scheming  head.  It  was  the 
Rolles  who  regarded  her  as  a  second-rate,  flighty  character, 
and  put  no  weight  on  her  gentle  interposition.  Even  the 
rector,  who  had  sufficient  parts  and  taste  to  discern  that 
the  matter  of  her  discourse  was  full  of  superior  sense,  and 
the  manner  of  it  more  exquisite  than  that  of  any  of  the 
great  ladies  he  had  known  and  admired  in  his  youth,  failed 
to  give  Grand'mere  her  due,  for  sturdy  English  prejudice, 
which  many  regai'd  as  a  grace,  had  blinded  him.  As  for 
Madam  Rolle,  she  was  so  stupid  and  stolid  as  to  the 
qualities  of  the  two  women,  and  their  claims,  that  when 
Grand'mere,  with  tact  and  tenderness,  introduced  the  topic 
of  the  American  War — in  which  all  England  was  interest- 
ed— the  Rolles  deeply  interested,  since  their  son  and 
brother  was  in  the  heat  of  it — and  ventured  a  warm  heart- 
ed, quite  sincere  reference  to  the  young  hero  of  Sedge 
Pond,  who  was  then  winning  his  laurels  on  the  Susque- 
hannah  or  the  Potomac,  and  whom  all  the  residents  at 
Sedge  Pond  delighted  to  honor,  Madam  Rolle,  with  her 
one  idea,  made  no  softened  response  to  breathing,  feeling 
Grand'mere,  but  chose  to  make  instead  a  final  appeal  to 
stony  Madame  Dupuy,  asking  her  Avistfully  if  she  was  the 
mother  of  a  son  as  well  as  of  a  daughter.  Then  with  a 
heightened  color  Madam  Rolle  proceeded  to  the  delicate 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  51 

investigation  as  to  whether  Madame  had  any  countrymen 
engaged  in  the  great  war,  for  her  Philip  had  mentioned 
that  Frenchmen  were  fighting  in  the  campaign  ;  and  though 
it  was  on  the  wrong  side  of  the  quarrel,  the  grounds  of  it 
were  so  far  away,  and  they  at  Sedge  Pond  had  so  little  to 
do  with  the  mother  country's  right  to  tax  a  dish  of  tea 
in  the  colonies,  that  Madam  had  a  dim  impression  that 
they  two  women  might  forget  that  their  young  men  were 
enemies  so  long  as  they  were  not  in  personal  conflict. 

But  Madame  Dupuy  knew  nothing  of  the  continent  of 
America,  and  cared  nothing  for  it,  unless  in  respect  to  the 
Huguenot  emigrants  in  the  Carolinas.  She  did  not  even 
know  that  there  was  a  mighty  struggle  going  on  across 
the  Atlantic,  by  which  men  were  being  torn  from  their 
peaceful  homes  and  were  going  the  length  of  engaging 
say  age  Indians  to  come  with  their  tomahawks  and  poison- 
ed arrows  to  aid  Christian  and  Saxon  brothers  against 
each  other ;  and  indeed  England  might  have  quarreled 
with  every  one  of  her  colonies,  and  driven  them  to  the 
same  position  as  the  Americas,  for  any  thing  Madame  would 
have  minded. 

Grand'mere,  in  her  rare  good-will  and  her  good-breed- 
ing, was  cast  into  the  shade  and  thrust  to  the  Avail  by  the 
Rolles.  Despair,  however,  was  so  foreign  to  Grand'mere, 
whatever  she  might  aver  to  the  contrary,  in  her  vivid 
French  phrases,  that  she  thought  better  of  the  situation, 
and  preferred  to  make  the  most  of  it,  by  addressing  her- 
self in  the  kindest  manner  to  a  humble  neutral  member  of 
the  party. 

According  to  the  etiquette  of  the  day,  Black  Jasper  had 
two  ways  of  disposing  of  himself.  He  might  repair  to  the 
servants'  hall,  or  he  might  remain  in  attendance  on  his 
master  and  mistress.  There  happened  to  be  no  servants' 
hall  at  the  Shottery  Cottage,  and  in  the  kitchen  Priscilla 
was  as  hard  to  make  acquaintance  with,  and  as  fain  to  re- 
buff raw  candidates  for  her  favor,  as  were  the  heads  of  the 
house.  Black  Jasper  had,  therefore,  after  a  full  quarter  of 
an  hour  of  uncertainty  and  waddling  between  the  door  of 
the  room  and  that  of  the  kitchen,  settled  on  the  skirts  of 
the  gentry,  taking  his  chance  of  his  master's  vehemenl 
impatience  and  scathing  ridicule,  and  of  the  tricks  and 
tyranny  of  the  two  young  madams. 


52  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Grand'mere  roused  herself  from  her  little  depression 
at  the  sight  of  the  sable  face  with  its  goggle  eyes.  She 
did  not  laugh  openly  or  secretly,  though  she  possessed 
naturally  that  merry  heart  which  doeth  good  like  medi- 
cine and  is  health  to  the  bones.  Grand'mere  did  not 
even  need  to  restrain  her  guileless  gayety  from  considerate 
care  for  what  might  be  Black  Jasper's  weakness  on  that 
point. 

From  the  background  Grand'mere  waved  to  Black  Jas- 
per, and  he,  glancing  at  his  master  the  while,  stumbled 
toward  her.  Grand'mere  not  only  dealt  with  Black  Jas- 
per as  flesh  and  blood,  but  she  pitied  him  as  the  black 
child,  oppressed,  bought  and  sold,  and  yet  toyed  with  by 
the  civilized  white  man  and  women.  She  wanted  to  do 
what  she  could  to  make  up  to  him.  She  asked  anxiously 
whether  her  good  gargon  had  health  and  strength  in  the 
cold  north.  She  bestowed  on  him  a  small  piece  of  money, 
with  an  apology  for  its  smallness,  and  an  entreaty  that  he 
would  accept  \t  for  the  sake  of  the  ideal  Negro,  who  was 
without  doubt  the  type  and  pattern  of  many  a  generous, 
devoted  black  man.  She  opened  her  particular  cupboard, 
and  taking  out  some  preserved  fruit,  recommended  the 
sweet-toothed  black  to  try  it,  and  to  tell  her  whether  it 
resembled  guavas  or  pines.  And  Black  Jasper,  totally 
unused  to  such  delicate  attentions,  grinned,  scraped,  dart- 
ed furtive  glances  at  his  master,  and  without  waiting  for 
an  answer,  obeyed  his  own  instinct,  and  became  on  the 
spot  a  bond  slave,  for  the  second  time  in  his  life,  to  "  the 
beauffle  old  Ma'am." 

The  rector  had  spirit  enough  to  resent  what  was  little 
short  of  insult  in  his  host's  treatment,  and  more  than 
enough  temper  to  show  his  resentment. 

"  I  perceive,  sir,  that  I  have  been  under  a  misapprehen- 
sion in  intruding  on  you,"  he  said,  in  a  white  heat  of 
'  wrath.  "  I  may  honestly  say  that  I  meant  to  do  my  duty 
and  confer  a  benefit.  My  parishioners  attach  some  consid- 
eration to  the  fact  whether  or  not  a  stranger  is  known  to 
their  clergyman.  But  if  I  mistake  not,  and  read  your  face 
aright,  my  absence  would  be  better  than  my  company,  to 
use  a  country  phrase  ;  and  you  may  depend  upon  it,  I  shall 
force  my  acquaintance  on  no  man." 

"  Aprbs  votes,  Monsieur  the  Rector,  replied  Monsieur,  in 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  53 

his  sardonic  French  politeness  ;  "  I  beg  to  thank  you  for 
your  intended  protection.  All  I  shall  say  is,  that  I  think 
I  can  take  care  of  my  own  head,  and  the  heads  of  ray  fam- 
ily, my  own  self."     And  he  bowed  Mr.  Rolle  off*. 

Thus  the  interview  was  a  total  failure.  Mr.  Philip  Rolle 
carried  out  his  dignified  presence  haughtily,  intending  never 
again  to  waste  it  on  traitors  and  impostors.  The  women 
of  the  Rolle  family,  for  their  part,  were  only  conscious 
that  the  visit  had  been  a  mistake  and  a  blunder,  and,  in  a 
panic  lest  there  should  be  more  high  words  and  violence, 
even  though  Mr.  Rolle  was  a  clergyman,  they  huddled  to- 
gether, and  mother  and  daughters  jostled  each  other  out. 
Black  Jasper,  in  the  half-turned  state  of  his  head,  was  ob- 
livious to  all  that  had  been  passing,  save  his  own  deli- 
cious treat ;  but  the  noise  of  the  ladies'  exit  aroused  him, 
and,  throwing  down  Grand'mere's  empty  can,  he  started  in 
pursuit  of  his  owners,  turning  back  so  often,  however,  to 
make  capering  salutes  to  Grand'mere,  that  Mr.  Philip 
Rolle  observed  the  pantomime,  and  called  out  loudly  that 
he  would  have  his  black  rascal  whipped  if  he  did  not  be- 
have like  a  rational  creature — a  line  of  conduct  as  impos- 
sible to  Black  Jasper  under  certain  influences  as  sight  is 
to  the  blind. 

"Vbild!  a  good  riddance,"  cried  Madame.  "Why 
should  they  come  here  prying  upon  us,  and  Avasting  our 
time  ?  Yolande,  child,  to  your  lace.  I  shall  finish  the 
Geneve  account  of  Barbe  Yot,  who  was  imprisoned  at 
Aigues  Mortez,  and  clothed  in  a  foul  hospital  dress,  from 
which  the  dogs  fled  howling,  and  refreshed  for  farther 
tortures  by  being  plunged  into  the  stagnant,  slimy  moat 
till  her  breath  went  out ;  and  of  her  sister,  Mesdeliees, 
avIio  was  shipped  among  a  hundred  other  young  women  in 
a  transport,  to  lie  like  rats  in  the  hold  till  they,  or  rather 
the  ghostly  skeletons  of  them,  were  landed,  and  put  up  by 
the  government,  in  lots  for  the  convenience  of  the  cotton- 
planters  of  Guadaloupc  and  Martinique — that  is  whal  I 
could  tell  of  their  America  and  their  Indies,  but  I  would 
not  tell  it  to  these  popinjays." 

But  Grand'mere  sat  and  looked  ruefully  after  the  re- 
treating company,  the  only  disinterested  company  which 
had  sought  the  Dupuys  at  the  Shot  t  cry  Cottage. 

"I  am  afflicted  that  I  have  vexed  you,  my  mother,"  said 


54  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

'  Monsieur,  coming   and  bending   coaxingly  over   the   old 
woman's  chair ;  "  but  it  is  true  what  Philippine  says." 

"  Ah  !  for  once,  for  once,"  interpolated  Philippine,  with 
great  animation  and  asperity,  as  she  courtesied  to  Mon- 
sieur ;  "  though  she  is  not  of  this  world,  it  is  her  pride  and 
boast  that  she  has  not  her  part  with  the  men  of  this  world, 
like  you,  Monsieur,  if  you  do  not  repent." 

"They  are  spies  and  despots,"  continued  Monsieur, 
quietly  ignoring  his  wife.  "  They  come  to  mock  us — to 
patronize  and  meddle  with  us.  Why  should  we  let  them 
come  when  we  are  sufficient  for  ourselves,  and  when  we 
dwell  in  peace  here?" 

"  I  know  not  if  you  are  right,  my  son,"  argued  Grand'- 
mere, meekly.  "  But  for  me,  I  can  not  see  why  we  should 
not  accept  their  visit  as  from  a  good  heart.  Whether 
they  mean  it  for  good  or  not,  I  can  not  tell.  Where  is  the 
necessity  or  the  advantage  of  living  like  owls,"  added 
Grand'mere,  with  her  accustomed  shrewdness,  "  when  no 
one  has  offered  to  molest  or  persecute  us  for  a  long  time  ? 
We  are  letting  the  child  grow  up  more  secluded  and  sol- 
itary than  if  "she  were  behind  the  grating.  I  think  we 
should  have  taken  an  act  of  friendship  as  if  it  were  friend- 
ship, that  therein  also  the  saying  of  the  Apostle  to  the 
Gentiles  might  have  been  fulfilled  ;  and  whether  our  fellow- 
creatures  mixed  with  us  in  simplicity  or  in  guile,  at  least 
they  mixed  with  us,  and  for  that  we  should  rejoice.  Who 
knows  whether  our  faith  and  love  might  not  have  changed 
the  base  metals  of  fraud  and  falseness  on  their  part  into 
the  gold  of  true  love  ?  Alas  !  my  son.  But  this,  at  least, 
I  pray  you  to  accord  me,  my  wayworn,  cumbered  Herbert, 
do  not  poison  the  young  girl's  mind  ;  let  her  at  least  learn 
to  hope  that  there  may~be  some  good  in  this  poor  old 
world." 

So  Grand'mere  was  left  to  talk  with  Yolande  of  the 
events  of  the  day,  to  draw  forth  the  girl's  opinion,  and  re- 
si>t  ami  refute  single-handed  the  evil  force  of  example. 

"I  am  sorry  that  you  have  not  made  friends  with  the 
English  pastor's  daughters,  little  one,"  says  Grand'mere, 
shaking  her  head,  in  the  wise  clear  prevision  of  wisdom. 

"So  am  not  I,  Grand'mere,"  retorts  the  girl,  with  her 
latent  repressed  passion  and  scorn.  "They  are  silly,  these 
English  girls,  as  well  as  saucy,  Grand'mere,  with  such  sauce 


THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY.  55 

— insipid  hot  water  -without  strength  or  sweetness.  Did 
you  see  how  they  whispered  and  tittered  till  they  ran 
away  ?" 

"  No,  I  did  not  see,  I  could  not  see  for  sighing  over  a 
wet  hen  of  a  malpropir,  distrait  girl,  who  forgot  to  do 
the  honors  of  her  own  household,  and  of  her  bread  and  salt." 

Yolande  winced,  and  endeavored  hastily  to  turn  aside 
this  thrust  by  a  pleasantry. 

"Grand'mere,  I  saw  no  bread  and  salt  going,  except  with 
regard  to  the  black  miserable." 

"  Fie  !  you  are  miserable  yourself,  Yolande,  to  call  him 
so,"  Grand'mere  checked  her  favorite  smartly ;  "  and  if 
you  think  silliness  (if  there  is  silliness,  I  have  never  said 
so)  is  a  bar  to  friendship,  you  are  no  better  than  one  of 
the  foolish  pedants  of  the  Hotel  Rambouillet,  whom  Mo- 
lie  re  scourged.  Silliness  is  a  greatei-,  more  incurable  mis- 
fortune than  being  a  cripple,  or  deaf  and  dumb.  Shall  we 
not  cherish  the  unfortunate  ?  What  mean  we  then  by  the 
terms,  Maison  de  Dieu,  Hotel  de  Dieu,  for  our  hospitals 
and  our  mad-houses,  but  that  he  who  giveth  to  the  poor 
lendeth  to  the  Lord.  I  tell  you,  Queen  of  Sheba  silliness 
on  the-one  side,  and  wisdom  on  the  other,  never  prevented 
either  friendship  or  love  worth  the  having.  It  is  only 
hardness  and  falseness  of  heart,  godlessness  and  no  love  to 
spare  from  one's  self,  that  can  dry  and  wither  the  heart, 
else  why  do  I  care  for  you,  poppet,  or,  in  reverse,  why  do 
you  care  for  an  out-of-date  doting  old  woman?" 

"  Grand'mere !  Grand'mere  !" 

"  Grand'mere  me  no  more.  Some  have  said  that  silli- 
ness is  an  absolute  requirement,  that  there  can  not  be  roy- 
al condescension  -without  a  big  and  a  little  soul.  But  I 
don't  say  so  ;  for  it  is  blessed  to  receive  also,  only  less 
blessed  than  to  give.  And  you  might  have  helped  each 
other, you  young  girls,"  Grand'mere  went  on;  "you  might 
have  bartered  your  best  qualities,  learned  to  understand 
truth  and  nobleness  in  other  natures  and  under  other 
names,  and  have  grown  more  kind  and  tender,  warmer  at 
heart,  and  more  glad  of  spirit.  It  is  a  bad  friend  of  your 
age  and  station  who  is  not  better  than  no  friend,  my  dear. 
I  love  not  the  religion  of  restriction — 'Touch  not,  taste 
not,  handle  not,  which  things  all  perish  in  the  using.'  Is 
it  not  so,  Yolandette  ?" 


50  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

"  Grand'mere !"  exclaimed  Yolande,  coming  out  of  a 
brown  study,  "  why  does  all  the  world  hate  us  Hugue- 
nots ?" 

"  That  goes  without  saying,  and  ought  we  to  break  our 
hearts  for  it  ?  Ought  we  not  to  rejoice  a  little  because 
of  another  sect  which  was  everywhere  spoken  against 
once,  and  which  happened  to  be  the  salt  of  the  earth,  nev- 
ertheless. In  our  case  there  are  special  causes.  We  were 
a  great  power  at  the  first.  Conde,  Coligni,  Castelnau, 
Mornay,  Sully,  Henry  IV.,  all  belonged  to  us.  The  Tre- 
mouilles,  the  Rochefoucaulds,  the  Rohans,  were  on  our 
side.  Catherine  de'  Medici  and  her  women  who  knew 
best,  made  a  fashion  of  singing  our  psalms.  Then  we 
were  betrayed  and  betrayers,  broken  and  crushed,  and  the 
vulgar  loved  to  tread  on  our  heads.  That  is  one  expla- 
nation, and  we  could  not  help  that ;  but  we  have  our- 
selves to  blame  as  well  as  the  four  seasons,  when  we  can 
not  count  our  brethren's  hatred  all  joy,  and  when  it  is 
necessary  that  we  sing  the  penitential  psalms  for  it.  We 
have  been  godly,  rigidly  righteous,  and  enduring  ;  but  we 
have  been  at  the  same  time  haughty,  stern,  unmerciful, 
implacable  in  our  judgments,  at  least  when  judgment  was 
all  our  possibility.  We  have  been  like  the  elder  brother 
of  the  prodigal  son,  my  grandchild,  who  was  very  exem- 
plary and  very  unkind.  It  is  a  marvel  how  many  relig- 
ious men  are  like  him,  considering  who  told  his  story,  and 
pointed  out  how  ungenerous  and  unmanly  he  was,  and 
how  unlike  his  father.  But  we  had  not  all  the  good 
things  of  this  life ;  thanks  to  God  we  were  not  like  him 
there.  We  had  hard  lines — too  hard  for  a  girl  like  you 
to  comprehend,  mhjnonne.  Consider,  we  were  not  allow- 
ed to  call  ourselves  in  law  husbands  and  wives;  our  little 
children  were  taken  from  us,  and  given,  with  their  share 
of  our  goods,  to  pretended  converts,  who  were  no  better 
than  traitors  in  our  houses.  We  were  forbidden  to  pray 
for  his  majesty  the  king,  Ave  were  so  vile ;  and  when  a 
poor  pastor  strewed  rosemary  on  his  young  daughter's 
bier,  and  had  her  followed  to  the  grave  by  young  girls 
like  herself  and  you,  he  was  arrested  by  the  authorities, 
condemned  and  punished  for  an  impudent  mimicry  of  the 
holy  church's  rites." 

"And    the    English    pastor,  too,   who    knows    better!" 


THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  57 

Yolande    pursued    her    own    disturbed   indignant    reflec- 
tions. 

"  He  knows  better,"'  Grand'mere  repeated,  emphatical- 
ly ;  and  then,  to  Yolande's  bewilderment,  the  old  woman 
finished  unexpectedly,  "  I  like  that  man.  How  he  goes 
against  the  grain  when  he  believes  it  is  demanded  of  him. 
How  he  is  honest  and  honorable !  I  could  trust  him  with 
my  life,  could  trust  him  better  with  my  honor,  better  than 
all  wTith  my  faith.  He  might  detest  me,  but  he  would 
not  wrong  me  by  a  straw;  he  would  put  his  right  hand 
into  the  flames  first.  He  would  sacrifice  his  Isaac,  his 
Joseph,  his  gallant  young  captain  first !  He  is  righteous ; 
he  has  a  will  like  that!  He  is  like  Jean  Calvin  in  bis 
will ;  he  is  not  like  Calvin  in  his  burning  heart  and  his 
keen  wit ;  but  he  is  like  Calvin  in  his  will." 

Grand'mere,  like  all  very  womanly  women,  paid  huge 
homage  to  manliness  ;  and  she,  who  was  of  the  Church 
the  earthly  origin  of  which  is  said  to  have  been  "Geneva, 
Calvin,  and  persecution,"  comprehended  Calvin. 

"You  speak  of  hatred,  Yolande,"  descanted  Grand'- 
mere, in  the  enthusiasm  which  Calvin's  name  always 
awoke  in  her ;  "  Calvin  was  hated.  It  is  not  good  for 
man  or  woman  not  to  be  hated,  but  they  must  be  loved 
also,  yes,  loved  as  men's  own  souls,  by  few  it  may  be — 
ah  well !  sometimes  the  fewer  the  lovers  the  better.  But 
Calvin  was  not  loved  by  few,  or  a  little  ;  he  was  loved 
by  Beze,  his  wife — the  poor  widow,  by  his  step-children, 
by  Geneva,  by  France,  by  Scotland.  People  will  speak  of 
how  he  burned  Servetus  and  clipped  out  a  woman's  hair. 
Go !  They  will  not  speak  of  how  he  held  the  hearts  of  a 
city,  a  nation,  in  his  brave  hand,  and  moulded  them  under 
God  to  religion  and  virtue.  The  great  Englishman  was 
thought  to  be  wise  when  he  said  that  the  ill  that  nun 
did  lived  after  them,  the  good  was  often  buried  with  their 
bones.  When  it  is  the  very  reverse,  my  child,  then  it  will 
be  heaven." 

C2 


58  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

THE   TKUCE    OF   GOD. 

The  arrival  and  departure  of  the  mail  by  the  coaches 
which  ran  between  London  and  Norwich,  only  failed  in 
enthralling  interest  to  those  who,  like  the  mass  of  the 
Sedge  Pond  people,  received  no  letters,  or  only  such  few 
and  far  betAveen  ones  as  made  great  incidents  in  their  lives. 
But  even  the  Hodges  and  the  Sams,  the  Jennies  and  the 
Nans,  who  got  no  letters,  and  looked  for  none,  hung  about, 
and  never  wearied  of  the  chance  of  beholding  the  coach, 
with  its  escort  armed  and  mounted,  its  guard  with  his 
sounding  horn,  and  its  sleepy  or  noisy  passengers  in  night- 
caps and  cocked  hats,  who  called  for  their  dinner  or  for 
tankards  of  lamb's-wool  ale,  or  glasses  of  French  brandy. 

Monsieur  Dupuy  was  a  regular  attendant  in  the  white- 
washed porch  of  the  ale-house  on  such  occasions.  He-  fre- 
quently received  letters  of  outlandish  shape,  addressed  in 
queer  handwriting ;  and  those  who  would  unhesitatingly 
and  adventurously  strive  to  read  them  over  his  shoulder, 
would  see  no  more  than  two  or  three  lines  of  Monsieur's 
jargon,  sometimes  actually  no  more  than  a  row  of  figures. 

Mr.  Philip  Rolle  was  no  less  punctual  in  waiting  for  the 
coach's  arrival,  to  get  the  last  news  of  the  war  in  which 
his  son  was  engaged.  When  the  news  were  very  exciting, 
particularly  when  they  contained  any  mention  of  Captain 
Philip,  or  when  Captain  Philip  himself  wrote  or  modestly 
alluded  to  his  own  promotion  or  any  credit  his  company 
had  gained,  Mr.  Philip  Rolle  would  sit  in  state  and  read 
the  letter,  and  talk  it  over  in  the  porch  of  the  ale-house, 
assiduously  waited  upon  and  looked  up  to  by  Master 
Swinfen,  mine  portly,  consequential,  self-seeking  host,  and 
his  nimble,  loose-tongued,  cowed-in-vain  partner.  The 
great  man  would  be  supplied  with  a  toast  and  a  tankard, 
and  a  single  pipe,  for  he  would  allow  no  more — neither  to 
himself  nor  to  any  other  person.  As  he  sat  in  state  and 
paid  the  lawing,  he  laid  down  the  law  and  would  answer 
all  inquiries  after  the  young  captain  more  patiently  and 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  59 

affably  than  any  one  who  had  seen  his  high  head  elsewhere 
would  have  expected.  Mr.  Rolle  would  also  wait  on  for 
the  news-letters  and  prints,  for  he  was  much  interested  in 
what  was  taking  place  in  London.  He  was  always  curi- 
ous to  know  if  "Mr.  Wilkes  had  committed  any  fresh  of- 
fense, or  Lord  North's  Ministry  had  become  better  liked. 
But  he  would  not  discuss  these  questions  on  the  ale-house 
bench,  though  he  had  little  opportunity  of  discussing  them 
in  any  other  quarter,  nor  would  he  gossip  of  the  floods  or 
the  robberies,  which  were  common  occurrences.  He  liked 
human  statistics,  like  all  clear-headed,  active-minded  men, 
but  it  was  only  the  subject  of  Captain  Philip  which  could 
unlock  the  flood-gates  of  Mr.  Rolle's  heart.  Captain  Phil- 
ip's name,  written  in  its  core,  was  the  one  soft  spot,  to 
touch  which  would  cause  the  stout  spiritual  soldier  to  un- 
bend, and  betray  him  into  prattling  like  a  woman  or  a  child. 

The  rector  was  thus  standing  one  day  with  his  ruffled 
hands  behind  his  back,  his  shovel  hat  shading  his  eyes  from 
the  autumn  sun  and  marking  him  out  at  once  from  the  lusty 
laborers  and  the  coach  passengers  in  their  cocked  hats,  as 
the  last  alighted  to  stretch  their  legs,  examine  the  priming 
of  their  pistols,  and  swallow  a  morsel  while  the  horses  were 
being  changed.  Monsieur,  for  once,  was  not  there.  He 
was  from  home  on  one  of  his  journeys  to  London  or  Nor- 
wich, but  the  usual  knot  of  grooms,  stable-boys,  and  tap- 
sters were  gathered  round  the  body  of  the  coach,  as  well 
as  Master  Swinfen  and  his  spouse,  with  the  working  men 
and  their  wives  and  children,  the  rector  forming  a  nucleus. 
And  the  group  was  not  bent  on  a  passing  diversion  alone, 
but  was  all  alive  and  expectant  of  a  generous  entertain- 
ment, eager  for  something  to  speak  of  over  their  broth  cans 
and  groat  bowls  for  weeks  to  come. 

The  village  was  already  lying  under  the  long  low  beams 
of  an  October  sun,  which  lighted  with  mellow  lustre  the 
"  Waaste"  bristling  brown,  and  the  Castle  woods  burning 
red  and  yellow  in  the  fires  of  the  first  frosts.  Important 
mails  were  expected  from  the  seal  of  war.  It  was  know  n 
that  the  rebels  had  invaded  Canada,  and  it  was  fully  cred- 
ited that  they  greatly  outnumbered  the  English  army. 
Even  though  they  did,  however,  it  was  confidently  l>e- 
lieved  that  they  must  have  been  beaten  back  with  so  sig- 
nal a  slaughter  that  the  disaster  al  Bunker  Hill  would  have 


60  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

been  clean  outweighed  by  a  sure  prospect  of  the  Avar's 
reaching  a  triumphant  termination. 

The  rector  was  drawing  himself  up,  as  one  towering  by 
anticipation  in  the  reflected  glory  of  his  son.  He  was  not 
flurried ;  Captain  Philip  had  seen  so  much  service  in  dif- 
ferent parts  of  the  world,  and  appeared  to  have  borne  so 
charmed  a  life  through  it  all,  that  it  seemed  as  if  nothing 
so  contemptible  as  the  rusty  sword  or  pistol  of  a  ragged 
American  volunteer  could  harm  him.  Neither  was  Mr. 
Rolle  absorbed  in  his  approaching  exaltation,  for  he  was 
privately  instructing  Master  Swinfen  to  broach  a  cask  of 
October,  to  have  pipes  laid  out,  and  to  make  a  dole  of 
black  and  white  puddings  to  the  women.  The  order  was 
overheard,  and  a  whisper  arose  that  the  rector  had  already 
received  special  intelligence,  and  that  Captain  Philip  must 
have  won  a  colonel's  epaulettes  at  least.  Indeed  the  pop- 
ulace Mould  not  have  been  much  surprised  although  it  had 
been  a  general's  white  feathers. 

At  last,  with  the  usual  strain  and  sway,  and  immense 
clatter  and  flourish,  the  "  Royal  Oak"  appeared  in  sight, 
and  was  hailed  with  as  much  acclamation  as  if  it  had  never 
been  seen  before.  Way  was  made  for  it  and  its  attendant 
horsemen  to  draw  up  before  the  ale-house  door. 

"Aught  for  me,  Will  Guard?"  cried  the  rector,  break- 
ing in  on  the  landlord's  usual  inquiry  as  to  what  was  doing 
on  the  road. 

"  Ay,  ay,  summut,  your  worship  ;  you  might  set  up  a 
dispatch-box  or  a  private  messenger,"  grumbled  the  guard, 
presuming  on  the  large,  official-looking  packet  he  was  dis- 
engaging from  the  boot.  "It  is  word  from  the  Americas. 
We  heard  tell  the  Fulriocather  was  in  port,  but  we  were 
off  to  catch  the  day-light  before  the  town  was  up  to  their 
sort.  You  may  just  let  us  he;ir,  sir,  whether  the  rebels 
have  laid  down  their  arms.  I  have  a  brother's  lad  gone 
out  with  Howe." 

"  With  -all  my  heart,  Will  Guard,  if  the  word  is  worth 
the  hearing,"  replied  the  rector,  and,  still  standing  in  the 
porch,  he  broke  open  the  seals  of  the  packet.  It  contained, 
besides  a  number  of  papers,  sundry  small  articles  which 
the  sender  had  taken  the  opportunity  of  forwarding  se- 
curely — Captain  Philip's  old  epaulettes,  which  he  had  worn 
with  such  honor,  and  had  now  put  off  for  still  higher  dis- 


THE    IIUGUEXOT    FAMILY.  61 

tinction  ;  a  pouch  in  Indian  work,  and  a  little  box  corded 
and  fastened — remembrances  which  the  kind  young  cap- 
tain might  have  sent  home  to  his  mother  and  his  sisters,  or 
even  to  Black  Jasper,  who,  coming  along  the  street  at  that 
moment  on  one  of  Madam's  commissions,  sidled  up  to  the 
others. 

The  rector  cast  a  rapid  glance  over  the  first  lines  of  the 
letter,  started,  and  put  his  hand  to  his  breast,  as  though 
he  had  been  shot,  then  stepped  back  and  lifted  up  a  grey- 
ghastly  face.  Without  uttering  a  syllable  to  the  hushed, 
expectant  company,  the  dullest  face  in  which  was  awed 
and  struck,  he  made  direct  for  the  rectory  gate,  presided 
over  by  its  stone  monsters.  As  he  walked  on,  the  people, 
not  daring  to  mingle  themselves  with  his  trouble  as  they 
had  mingled  with  his  triumph,  looked  after  him  with 
smothered  sighs  and  groans,  which  at  last  swelled  to  a 
clamor  of  lamentation.  As  he  went  on,  looking  neither 
to  left  nor  right,  he  stumbled  over  a  stone  in  the  road,  and 
the  negro  lad,  stunned  rather  than  rightly  apprised  of  the 
weight  of  the  catastrophe — the  great  tragedy  which  had 
been  enacted  last  fall  over  the  seas,  and  after  many  a  delay 
and  detour  had  this  day  reached  the  quiet  Sedge  Pond 
home — rushed  forward  obsequiously  to  remove  the  obstacle 
from  his  master's  path.  Obeying  an  instinct,  Mr.  Philip 
Rolle  was  pushing  the  intruder  out  of  his  way,  when  an- 
other impulse  seized  him;  he  grasped  the  black  servant's 
shoulder  with  a  strength  which  caused  Jasper  to  writhe 
and  recoil,  and  communicated  to  the  servant  the  misery 
which  was  wringing  his  heart  and  convulsing  his  brain, 
and  which  he  must  speak  out  or  die. 

"Black  Jasper,  Captain  Philip's  fellow,  your  'massa'  i- 
dead,  shot  through  the  head  last  year  when  the  rebels 
took  Ticonderoga.  They  have  sent  me  his  epaulettes 
and  his  box  as  a  token,  I  imagine.  Do  you  hear,  Black 
Jasper?"  the  rector  broke  off,  and  went  on  repeating 
his  terrible  statement,  with  his  voice  rising  at  length  i" 
a  shout,"My  son  Philip,my  only  son  Philip,is  dead!  is 
dead!" 

With  that  he  broke  down  and  hurst  into  weeping,  an 
awful  sight  to  see — and  so  he  entered  at  the  rectory  gate, 
and  walked  through  the  clipped  hollies  and  yews  to  the 
house,  while  the  shocked  and  appalled  villagers  gazed  and 


G2  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

listened  intently,  and  the  touched  travelers  thought  they 
could  hear  a  wail  and  a  cry  coining  faintly,  hut  with 
piercing  acuteness,  from  beyond  the  pleasance. 

That  same  October  noon  Grand'mere  had  been  sunning  - 
herself  in  the  Shottery   Cottage  arbor,  which  was  then 
hung  round  with  tawny  leaves  and  clusters  of  blue-black 
berries.     She  was  looking  at  the  trouts,  still  occasionally 
leaping  in  the  pond  which  the  villagers  called  the  Stew, 
and  at  the  bees  also  sunning  themselves  after  they  had 
laid  up  their  competence  of  honey,  and  were  resting,  like 
her,  with  their  work  done  for  the  season ;  and  as  she  look- 
ed she  listened  to  the  robin,  which,  like  a  sweet  and  virtu- 
ous soul,  only  lifts  up  its  song  of  trust  and  praise  the  more 
cheerily  and  patiently  when  the  whole  world  languishes  in 
decay  and  approaching  death.     In  the  autumn  brightness 
of  the  home  scene,  Grand'mere's  fancy  was  spirited  away 
to  her  native  land  and  the  scenes  of  her  youth.     She  was 
describing  to  Yolande,  who  was  plaiting  straw  on  a  stool 
at  her  knee,  how  different  from  this  England,  now  sodden 
in  its  greenness,  was  her  Languedoc  and  Provence.     She 
kindled  up  as  she  spoke  of  the  glory  of  color  there  was  in 
the  very  salt  lakes  and  marshes^in  the  arid  limestone  rocks, 
and  the  bare  heaths  of  the  south,  contrasted  with  the  green 
luxuriance  of  England,  blanched  by  such  dim  light  as  fell 
from  the  cold,  pallid  northern  skies.     And  she  grew  elo- 
quent as  she  told  that  there  were  distant  snowy  peaks  and 
blue  defiles ;  and  that,  for  patches  of  corn,  meadow,  and 
woodland,  they  in  France  had  soft  grey  olive  and  deep 
green  and  golden  mulberry  and  orange  gardens;  and  that 
for  honeysuckle  and  briony  they  at  home  had  among  the 
grass  scarlet  anemones  with  the  living  blue  of  salvias  and 
the  white  of  asphodel  by  the  roadside,  while  there  were 
tall  pink  gladioli  in  the  glades,  and  spreading  pink  daphne 
on    the   uplands,  and    oleanders,  jasmines,  and   bay-trees 
breaking  the  hedges.     The  nightingale  sang  there  over 
April  roses  and  November  violets.     It  was  such  a  land  of 
fertility  and  barrenness,  passion  and  repose,  as  King  David 
ruled  over,  as  the  son  of  David  walked  in,  saying,  "Con- 
sider the  lilies,  how  they  grow." 

Grand'mere  was  interrupted  by  Priscille,  in  her  cala- 
manco petticoat,  linen  jacket,  and  linen  cap,  advancing 
toward  the  pair.     The  maid  had  downcast,  grudging,  in- 


THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  G3 

troverted  eyes,  not  because  she  was  a  suspicious  character, 
but  because  they  had  early  had  her  club-foot  perpetually 
suspended  before  them,  while  at  the  same  time  they  had 
not  cared  to  look  at  it ;  and  she  walked  with  a  heavy, 
dogged  lameness,  and  carried  a  basting-spoon  in  her  hand, 
as  one  who  minded  her  business,  notwithstanding  that  she 
had  an  ancient  quarrel  with  the  world. 

"  Don't  'ee  be  overcome,  old  madam,  don't  'ee,"  insisted 
Priscille. 

"I  am  not  overcome,  Priscille,"  declared  Grand'rnere, 
sedately,  though  her  peachy  complexion  waned  a  little 
waxen,  and  her  grey  eyes  glanced  up  at  her  son's  window. 
"  What  is  there  that  I  should  be  ovei-come  ?" 

"  Now,  speak  out,  Prie,"  cried  Yolande,  jumping  up  like 
a  squirrel,  and  scattering  her  straws  to  the  four  corners  of 
the  garden.  "  What  is  it  ?  The  good  God  be  praised,  it 
can  be  naught  to  Grand'mere.  Oh,  my  heart !  what  is  it, 
my  woman  ?" 

"  Did  'ee  ever  hear  such  a  child,  did  'ee  ?"  protested 
Priscille,  indignantly.  "  She'll  be  mum  for  days,  and  then 
she'll  break  out  chattering  like  a  pie.  An'  she  do  have 
littered  the  garden  for  a  week,  and  me  with  the  beet-root 
and  the  carrots  to  lift  at  my  own  hand.  If  it  isn  that  black 
beetle  from  the  rectory  have  come  howling  here.  No,  I 
don't  call  no  names;  but  he  is  liker  a  beetle  than  aught. 
else  in  creation,  an'  it  be  not  an  ape,  and  the  term  came 
to  my  tongue  end.  It  is  all  wrong  at  the  parson's.  News 
has  come  that  the  young  captain's  gone — gone  to  his  rest, 
madam,  by  a  hard  road.  Parson  is  in  a  sad  taking,  for 
though  he  may  have  preached  as  often  as  there  are  hairs 
in  his  wig  that  '  all  flesh  is  grass,'  he  can  not  abide  that 
his  own  grass  should  be  cut  down  in  its  bloom  any  the 
more  for  that.  The  young  mistresses  arc  cowering  and 
gracing  like  turkey  pouts,  or  screeching  hoarse  like  the 
bittern  in  the  Waaste.  Madam  herself,  she's  lying  :ii<>p 
of  her  bed,  where  they  laid  her  in  a  swound,  and  si  nig- 
gling to  swallow  down  her  mother  heart,  because  shi'  is 
still  a  mother,  though  she  choke  and  die  \\\  the  deed.  The 
maids  trow  she  will,  the  short-sighted  woman.  Now, 
madam,  didn't  'ee  promise  not  to  be  overcome?"  cried 
Priscille  reproachfully,  as  Grand'mere  wrung  her  hands, 
and  her  tears — the  transparent   crystal  tears  <>f  the  aged 


64  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

— fell  like  rain,  for  she  could  still  cry  for  others  though 
she  had  long  ceased  to  cry  for  herself. 

"  My  good  Priscille,  let  sorrow  and  sympathy  have  their 
way.  Do  not  attempt  to  stifle  the  bitter  spring  like  the 
poor  Madam  up  at  the  rectory,  lest  the  soil  be  poisoned. 
Alas  !  and  the  sun  is  so  warm  even  in  England,  and  the 
world  is  so  fair,  and  men  and  women  are  in  such  trouble, 
Priscille." 

"  What  would  you  have,  Madam  ?  It  were  always  so," 
argued  Prie,  dogmatically. 

"  No,  big  Prie,"  denied  Grand'mere,  recovering  herself. 

"  And  'twill  be  always  so,"  said  Prie,  still  more  obsti- 
nately. 

"  Least  of  all,  my  Prie,"  negatived  Grand'mere,  decided- 
ly brightening  up  and  clasping  her  hands  in  silent  hope. 
"Have  shame  of  yourself,  a  Christian  woman,  to  sayso.'_' 

"  Leastways  in  your  time  and  mine,  Madam,"  maintain- 
ed Prie,  fighting  for  the  last  word,  and  illustrating  it  by  a 
jerk  of  her  club  foot.  "And  since  we  have  gotten  our 
own  stock,  I  do  not  see  that  we  ought  to  take  a  burden  of 
other  folks.  That  there  bullering 'jackdaw,  Black  Jasper, 
must  see  you,  and  you  must  go  up  to  the  rectory,  accord- 
ing to  his  story — a  pretty  story,  when  you  have  not  been 
within  a  strange  door,  or  bidden  to  it,  since  you  came  to 
Sedge  Pond.  If  they  forget  me  when  they  are  glad,  they 
need  not  mind  me  when  they  are  sad,  say  I." 

"  Oh,  that  poor  Priscille  !"  exclaimed  Grand'mere,  as  if 
at  a  climax  of  vexation  and  disappointment.  "  Does  she 
not  know  that  that  is  the  greatest  compliment  of  all  !  A 
brother  is  born  for  adversity.  See  you  that  a  Christian 
should  recognize  a  brother  through  all  disguises.  #  And 
what  care  I,  though  they  can  manage  their  prosperity,  to 
which  they  invite  their  distant  relations  and  their  slight 
acquaintances,  without  me.  I — I  love  better  to  be  the 
brother." 

After  all,  it  was  Black  Jasper,  and  not  the  Holies,  who 
sought  Grand'mere.  In  the  extremity,  the  black  boy  had 
gone  so  entirely  out  of  himself,  that  he  had  acted  on  his 
own  responsibility.  His  philosophy  had  been  simple 
enough.  Massa  had  told  Black  Jasper,  Captain  Philip's 
fellow,  of  his  loss  first  of  all.  That  had  made  the  most 
profound  impression,  and  Jasper  Avas  not  without  pride  in 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  65 

his  sorrow  when  he  thought  of  it.  Then  followed  the  plain 
deduction  that  Captain  Philip's  fellow  was  bound  to  do 
something  in  order  to  respond  to  the  trust  Captain  Philip's 
massa  and  his  family  had  put  in  him  in  their  distress. 
Black  Jasper  could  not  cudgel  his  brains ;  he  could  only 
leap  to  a  conclnsion.  The  Rolles  had  no  near  neighbors 
their  equals  in  rank — none  with  whom  he  was  very  familiar. 
But  a  bright  idea  led  him  to  except  the  French  family  at 
the  Shottery  Cottage — though  whether  he  had  sufficient 
powers  of  comparison  and  association  to  class  persons  so 
different  with  himself,  and  incline  to  them  as  strangers 
also,  is  doubtful.  But  the  beautiful  old  French  lady  had 
been  good  to  Black  Jasper,  and  he  would  go  and  ask  her 
to  be  good  to  Massa  Rolle  and  his  household  in  their  calami- 
ty, and  to  find  something  good  for  them  which  they  might 
eat  and  drink,  and  so  break  their  doleful  fast. 

Boor  Black  Jasper  in  his  childish  appetites  was  not  so 
far  behind  the  wisest  sons  of  consolation.  Grand'mere 
was  disposed  to  adopt  Black  Jasper's  view  in  part.  She 
came  from  a  country  where  guilds  of  charity  and  mercy 
have  long  established  a  right  to  the  sick  and  the  sorrowful, 
and  take  possession  of  them.  The  country  people  were 
good,  but  they  were  dull  or  gross.  Grand'mere  called 
them  so  without  inyidiousness.  They  might  miss  doing 
something  which  would  soften  the  hard  blow.  These  poor 
Rolles,  she  felt,  were  too  much  hurt  to  bear  malice. 
Grand'mere  reflected  almost  passionately,  too,  that  they 
should  have  come  to  the  Dupuys  in  their  good  days,  and 
got  nothing  better  from  them  than  mockery  and  abuse. 
As  to  power  to  work  her  will,  Grand'mere  was  the  mosl 
independent  lady  m  the  land — she  would  never  have 
dreamt  of  asking  Monsieur  her  son's  consent  to  her  expe- 
dition even  had  he  been  at  home,  though  she  might  have 
made  an  appeal  to  his  humanity.  As  to  being  compelled 
to  consult  and  come  to  one  mind  with  Madame  Dupuy, 
there  was  not  even  the  necessity  of  asking  her  leave  to 
carry  Yolande  along  with  her  on  her  mis-ion.  The  rule 
of  the  eldest  was  supreme  at  the  Shottery  Cottage;  the 
patriarchal,  or  parental  form  of  governmenl  dominated 
there,  and  power  was  vested  in  the  senior,  and  was  no 
more  affected  by  her  being  an  old  woman  than  if  the  Salic 
law  had  been  abrogated  first  of  all  in  France. 


06  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

"  Quick,  Yolande  !"  cried  Grand'mere,  "  my  capote  and 
Madame  Rougeole.  But  alas  !  the  little  red  madame  can 
do  nothing  here  ;  on  second  thoughts,  I  think  we  will  leave 
her  behind ;  the  color  might  remind  them  of  the  poor 
young  man's  uniform  or  of  his  blood — broken  hearts  are 
so  ingenious.  Now  do  you  comprehend,  proud  little  one, 
what  it  would  have  been  for  you  to  have  been  friends  with 
these  poor  girls  who  are  brotherlcss  ?" 

"  I  am  very  sorry,  Grand'mere,"  said  Yolande  penitent- 
ly. "  I  do  not  think  I  should  like  other  girls  to  come  near 
me  in  my  sorrow  ;  but  then,  you  know,  I  am  shy,  though 
not  patient,  as  a  Huguenot.  I  should  have  liked  to  have 
been  able  to  help  them  now.  These  girls  loved  their 
brother,  Grand'mere.  I  once  heard  them  speaking  of  him 
when  they  passed  us  in  our  walk — how  brave  and  clever 
and  grand  he  was,  and  what  he  would  do  for  his  sisters 
when  he  came  back  a  general.  I  can  guess  how  they  hung 
upon  him,  and  exulted  in  his  uniform,  and  walked  abroad 
with  him  in  it,  the  last  time  he  was  at  home." 

"  Tell  them  so,  my  dear ;  ask  them  to  describe  him ;  say 
you  never  had  a  brother,  but  would  like  to  hear  of  theirs. 
They  will  vie  with  each  other  in  showing  what  is  their 
loss,  find  it  will  relieve  their  poor  hearts." 

The  rectory,  which  was  usually  the  trimmest  house  in 
the  parish,  from  its  china  closet  to  its  kitchen-garden, 
already  betrayed  symptoms  of  that  extraordinary  distress 
in  which  the  ordinary  business  of  life  is  arrested  and  lost 
Bight  of.  Nobody  had  any  duties  left  them  now  that  Cap- 
tain Philip  had  been  killed  last  year  at  Ticonderoga.  The 
most  sacred  precincts  of  the  house  had  become  common 
ground,  always  with  the  reservation  of  tlie  rector's  study, 
into  which  he  had  locked  himself.  The  servants  were 
wandering  about  everywhere,  and  doing  nothing  except 
contributing  to  render  this  day  wholly  unlike  any  other 
day  even  in  its  outwai'd  symbols  of  wretchedness. 

Grand'mere  came,  like  an  interested  friend  and  house- 
mistress,  with  the  face  and  voice  of  restored  discipline. 
Her  tact  and  discretions  peedily  and  noiselessly  removed 
the  overwhelming  traces  of  disaster  and  dismay,  restoring 
order  and  harmony  without  provoking  rebellion. 

"The  son  of  the  house  is  dead,  that  is  too  true,  but  the 
clothes  must  be  laid  away  from  the  wash,  and  the  mastiff 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  G7 

must  have  his  meal.  There  will  still  be  clothes  to  be 
worn,  and  you  will  not  stint  the  dog  for  the  man's  loss 
— or  gain.  The  beast  howls,  truly,  and  why?  Because 
he  hungers.  You  need  not  fear  to  do  your  work,  my  girls, 
he  will  not  be  forgotten:  and  if  you  wish  to  remember 
him  particularly,  you  can  still  do  it  on  the  Day  of  the 
Dead,  with  the  living  not  neglected  by  you.  What !  you 
have  no  Day  of  the  Dead  in  England  ?  Then  you  can  re- 
member him  with  the  other  blessed  departed  as  you  re- 
member on  your  bed  their  Lord  and  yours,  in  whom  they 
still  live,  and  you  can  meditate  on  them  in  the  night 
watches." 

Poor  Dorothy  and  Camilla,  unfitted  to  cope  with  the 
grim  giant  Care,  were  quite  unable  to  control  themselves, 
left  alone  as  they  had  been  for  the  first  time  in  their  lives. 
But  in  their  horror  and  desolation  they  were  sensible  that 
a  friend  had  come  to  them,  and  they  cast  themselves  with 
full  hearts  on  her  protection.  Grand'mere  roused  Dorothy 
from  the  seat  on  which  she  sat  shivering  as  with  gnat 
cold,  and  listening,  with  fixed  eyes  and  curdling  blood,  to 
a  conclave  of  the  elder  servants.  For  sore  sorrow,  like 
sore  sickness,  breaks  down  artificial  distinctions,  and  drives 
some  men  and  women  into  the  comj^any  of  their  fellows, 
as  it  drives  others  into  the  solitude  of  the  wilderness. 

And  now  each  servant  mysteriously  and  fanatically  dc- 
livered*her  experience  in  the  matter  of  corpse-candles, 
death-spills,  death-watches,  taking  note  of  what  she  had 
observed  lately,  and  comparing  it  with  the  result.  Doro- 
thy might  have  learned  for  all  her  life  afterward  to  look  on 
death  as  a  dark  fate  haunting  her,  hoveling  over  her  in  her 
own  person  and  in  those  of  the  friends  she  loved,  and  from 
which  she  could  by  no  means  escape,  not  even  by  prayer 
and  fasting.  She  might  have  learned  to  look  out  for  it  in 
dim  prognostications,  to  watch  for  it,  and  anticipate  its 
cruel  blows  in  incipient  madness. 

"  Our  Bibles  say  we  know  not  the  day  nor  the  hour  ;  bul 
He  knows — that  is  enough,"  said  Grand'mere,  rebuking  the 
ancient  heathen  superstition;  and  she  effectually  shut  the 
mouths  of  the  seers,  at  least  till  Dorothy  \\;i<  out  of  earshot. 

Grand'mere  calmed  and  soothed  Camilla,  too,  and  over- 
came those  wild  hysterics  which  were  shaking  the  poor 
girl's  body  like  a  reed  in  the  wind. 


08  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

But,  in  the  depth  of  her  pity  and  the  height  of  her  rev- 
erence, she  hesitated  to  approach  the  chief  sufferers,  and 
almost  drew  back  from  them.  Though  she  was  acquainted 
with  some  passages  in  the  works  of  the  great  English  poet 
— in  her  day  little  known  to  French  readers — it  is  not  like- 
ly she  had  heard  of  Constance  commanding  the  kings  and 
princes  to  stand  in  her  presence  because  of  the  supreme 
majesty  of  her  woe.  But  she  had  a  fine  realization  of  the 
sentiment,  and  it  was  trembling  on  her  lips,  when  she  at 
last  entered  Madam's  chamber. 

Madam,  as  she  lay  there  to  recover  and  master  herself, 
had  just  gasped  out  an  odd  wish,  "I  could  desire  that 
Lucy  Gage  were  alive  and  could  come  here  now.  They 
say  she  was  ever  found  in  the  house  of  mourning,  and  had 
acquired  the  art  of  drying  up  tears,  that  they  might  not 
drown  the  wit  and  flood  the  senses,  I  mean,  alack-a-day ! 
what  will  become  of  the  rector's  sermon,  and  to-morrow  is 
Sunday.  Where  are  Dolly  and  Milly? — they  are  not  af- 
frighted of  me  still?  Indeed,  I  must  get  up,  good  people, 
for  my  head  doth  swim  no  longer  as  if  I  were  seized  with 
the  falling  sickness.  I  shall  have  no  need  to  be  blooded ; 
there  was  no  call  to  bleed  my  boy  when  his  head  swam. 
Oh !  Lord !  Lord ! — shot  through  the  head ! — I  can  see 
his  wet  clotted  locks  at  this  moment." 

"Madam,"  said  Grand'mfcre,  "lam  not  come  to  comfort 
you — I  dare  not.  I  sit  at  your  feet  instead.  I  hUe  had 
many  afflictions  ;  I  am  an  aged  widow  now,  ending  my 
days  in  a  country  not  my  own.  But  I  have  never  followed 
the  bier  of  a  dead  man,  and  he  my  only  son.  Madam,  how 
much  the  good  Lord  must  have  loved  you  and  yours  when 
He  chastened  you  so  much." 

Madam  looked  up,  but  closed  her  eyes  again  with  a  low 
murmur,  "Ah  !  lam  a  poor  creature.  Do  not  tell  my  hus- 
band, he  has  such  heavy  trouble,  I  shrink  from  such  terri- 
ble love." 

"More  than  you,  Madam,  all  men  of  themselves  beat 
their  breasts  and  lie  in  the  dusl  to  escape  it,  but  still  He 
loves,  as  sure  as  the  world  moves.  Ih;  does  not  love  us 
because  we  love  Him,  either  first  or  last." 

"And  can  you  believe  lie  loved  my  Philip  when  He  call- 
ed him  to  his  account  in  a  moment  without  warning  or  prep- 
aration?" pleaded  Madam,  piteously.     "lie  was  good,  my 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  69 

son,"  continued  the  quiet  woman,  growing  vehement ;  "  he 
had  only  a  man's  ability,  and  he  had  a  man's  falls,  but  he 
was  honest,  dutiful,  religious  to  our  knowledge.  Still,  what 
do  we  know  ?  He  was  in  camp  in  time  of  war,  and  we  shall 
never  hear  if  he  was  ready,  and  how  he  met  his  call." 

"  Again  I  say  there  is  One  who  knows  all  that,  my  poor 
Madam — knows  all  the  young  man's  faith  in  His  word,  all 
his  seeking  after  Him,  all  his  obedience  to  his  father  on 
earth,  and  to  his  commander  here,  and  all  the  sharpness  and 
suddenness  of  his  mortal  end.  You  trusted  our  Lord  with 
his  life  ;  say,  then,  will  you  not  trust  Him  with  his  death  ?" 

"  Then  I  will,  for  I  must,"  submitted  Madam,  meekly ; 
"  but  French  or  no  French — forgive  me  for  saying  it — you 
are  a  good  old  soul  to  come  and  put  it  so  to  me.  I  wish 
Mr.  Rolle  could  hear  you." 

"  And  teach  me  nobler  truth,  as  an  ordained  servant  of 
our  Master — is  it  not  so  ?"  asked  Grand'mere.  "  Ah  ! 
Madam,  when  avc  have  crossed  the  river  and  thrown  oft* 
our  rags  for  His  raiment,  shall  we  stop  and  ask  each  other 
whether  we  are  French  or  English,  or — (you  shudder,  but 
you  can  say  it,  good  woman) — American  ?  No,  nor  even 
whether  we  are  Protestant  or  Catholic ;  but  only  whether 
we  bear  the  name  of  the  Cross-bearer  who  bore  our  sor- 
rows as  well  as  our  sins." 

"  Mother — yes,  I  hope  you  will  let  me  pay  you  the  duty 
and  service  I  owe  you  to  call  you  so,  for  I  remember  they 
all  called  you  mother,  or  grandmother,  that  day  in  summer, 
long  ago,  when  we  spoke  of  him,  and  I  was  deceived  and 
believed  myself  a  rich  mother  still;  and  he  Avas  moulder- 
ing under  the  damp  leaves  of  those  great  forests  he  used 
to  tell  us  of  (for  he  served  before  in  Canada,  against  your 
people :  you  will  not  mind  it  now,  you  are  too  sorry  for 
us,  and  too  kind); — he  was  so  clever,  almost  as  clever  :is 
his  father,  and  the  gallantest  soldier  in  the  British  army; 
he  twice  had  the  thanks  of  his  regiment  presentcMl  to  him, 
it  was  writ  to  his  father.     He  saved  a  fort  from  being  sur- 

frised  in  the  East  Indies,  and  nobody  could  save  him— but 
do  not  blame  his  comrades;  he  would  not  have  blamed 
them,  for  he  loved  them  as  brothers.  T  am  a  simple  par- 
son's wife, but  I  thank  God  I  can  remember  all  that.  Yon 
are  old  enough  to  be  my  mother — no  offense,  madam — and 
I  shall  not  forget  your  coming  to  us  in  our  sorrow.     What 


70  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

although  you — no,  not  you,  but  your  family — all  but  shut 
the  door  in  our  faces  when  we  went  to  see  you?  I  dare 
say  you  mistook  us,  or  had  some  reason  for  your  ill-behav- 
ior. I  declare  you  have  done  a  great  deal  better  than  show 
us  the  most  finished  politeness.  I  shall  tell  Mr.  Ilollc  when 
he  is  able  to  hear  it ;  and  he  will  thank  you,  and  his  thanks 
are  worth  the  having.  I  shall  tell  Lady  Ilolle,  our  patron- 
ess, when  she  comes  down  to  the  Castle,  and  she  may  do 
something  for  your  Spitalfields  colony.  Now,  I  am  on  no 
ceremony  with  you,  I  am  going  to  dismiss  you,  for  I  must 
rise  and  go  to  Philip's  father." 

"But  he  will  not  receive  you,"  said  the  rector,  as  he 
walked  into  his  Avife's  room,  "  for  Philip's  father  comes  to 
Philip's  mother,  because  the  woman  is  the  weaker  vessel, 
and  it  is  for  the  man  to  honor  and  cherish  her — that  is  how 
I  read  the  text,  Madame  Dupuy." 

He  was  white  and  shaken,  a  man  who  had  aged  ten  years 
in  a  day.  He  was  a  little  fallen  in  the  face  yet  when  he 
tried  to  smile,  but  his  suit  was  in  decent  order — possibly 
his  head  had  been  anointed,  and  his  face  washed  also,  and 
all  his  resolution  and  manliness  given  back  to  him.  He 
had  wrestled  for  that  as  well  as  for  resignation,  and  his 
Master  Avas  no  niggard ;  he  had  got  all  he  sought. 

"  No,"  corrected  Madam,  "  you  name  the  younger,  bitter 
woman ;  but  I  do  not  think  any  body  will  be  bitter  to  us 
again.  Philip — ah  me!  the  only  Philip  I  have  left! — this 
is  the  old  dame  whom  everybody  called  Grand'mere." 

"  I  do  not  remember  ;  I  believe  my  memory  as  well  as 
my  faith  faileth  me.  Don't  contradict  me,  Millie;  the 
woman's  place  is  to  be  silent  and  listen  to  the  man.  I 
think  even  this  old  French  madame — Madame  Dupuy,  mere, 
be  it — will  not  dispute  that  quite,  in  precept,  whatever  she 
may  do  in  example.  I  rated  my  dear  son's  promotion  too 
low,  and  that  is  why  my  faith  failed  me,  and  so  I  bore  a 
false  testimony  before  my  people.  I  was  too  low  myself, 
and  too  worldly-minded,  though  I  am  a  priest.  French 
priests  err  in  that  way  too  sometimes,  do  they  not,  mad- 
ame? My  boy  has  his  promotion,  the  very  highest.  He 
died  at  his  post,  and  I  shall  stand  at  mine.  I  pray  God 
that  He  may  give  me  strength  to  stand  at  his  altar  to- 
morrow, and  bear  a  true  testimony  in  returning  thanks  for 
Philip's  heavenly  promotion.     I  would  have  celebrated  his 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  i  1 

earthly  rise  in  the  ale-house,  but  only  God's  house  is  fit 
when  the  step  is  to  the  skies." 

"Monsieur,"  cried  Grand'mere,  forgetting  her  English, 
and  her  avoidance  of  all  sectarian  allusion  at  the  same  time, 
"  you  speak  nobly,  you  speak  like  Jean  Calvin  himself." 

"  Ha !"  exclaimed  Mr.  Philip  Rolle,  with  a  faint  gleam 
of  gratification,  "  you  are  too  good,  you  do  me  too  much 
honor.  I  do  not  hold  Calvin's  tenets,  but  I  respect  the 
man.     He  was  no  anarchist,  no  latitudinarian." 

Thus  it  happened  that  in  the  days  of  bruised  and  broken 
hearts  there  was  a  truce  in  the  national  and  sectarian  hos- 
tilities. A  compromise  was  effected,  from  which  Monsieur 
and  Madame  Dupuy  simply  stood  aloof;  but  Grand'mere 
Avas  no  longer  a  stranger  to  the  Rolles,  Yolande  went  to 
the  rectory,  and  was  courteously  and  kindly  received  by 
the  rector  and  his  wife ;  Dorothy  and  Camilla  came  to  the 
Shottery  Cottage,  and  were  tolerated  by  Monsieur  and 
Madame — borne  with,  indulged,  and  indirectly  taught  by 
Grand'mere. 

About  the  same  time  that  the  neAvs  came  of  the  gallant 
young  Captain  Philip  Rolle's  death  in  a  land-fight,  there 
arrived  also  word  of  the  death  of  one  of  Lady  Rolle's 
younger  sons,  a  naval  officer,  in  a  sea-fight,  in  which  the 
renegade  Paul  Jones  had  a  hand.  But,  though  Sedo-e 
Pond  had  a  little  pride  in  having  contributed  two  heroes 
and  martyrs  to  English  history,  stirred  thereto  by  the 
Roman  spirit  of  Mr.  Philip  Rolle,  who  would  fain  have  felt 
himself,  and  called  on  others  to  feel,  a  stern  joy  in  the 
noble  sacrifice,  all  that  Sedge  Pond  heard  or  saw  of  the 
Rolle  of  the  Castle's  death  was  the  messenger  who  hur- 
ried down  to  hang  up  the  hatchment  on  the  wall. 


CHAPTER   VII. 

SQUIRE  GAGE,  WHO  RODE  AND  READ — THE  YOUNG  SQUIRE 
WHO  WALKED  BY  HIS  FATHER'S  BRIDLE — THE  MINISTRY 
OF    WOMEN. 

Visits,  like  misfortunes,  come  not  singly.      The  Dupuys, 
who  had  been  six  months  at  Sedge  Pond  without  having 

been  waited  on  by  a  neighbor,  were  within  a  month  alter 


72  THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY. 

the  rector's  demonstration  required  to  throw  open  their 
doors  to  a  couple  of  country  gentlemen,  who  had  traveled 
half  a  day's  journey  out  of  their  direct  road  to  call  upon 
the  French  family.  They  appeared  in  a  guise  so  strange 
as  to  puzzle  and  confound  even  Grand'mere's  eyes,  accus- 
tomed though  they  were  to  many  of  the  strange  sights  of 
that  strange  time. 

"Here  be  a  Bedlamite  and  his  keeper,"  said  Priscille, 
announcing  the  strangers.  "  They  have  got  in  at  the  gar- 
den-door, and  corned  up  the  path,  and  now  they  be  a- 
pounding  at  the  house-door." 

The  family  were  thus  called  in  considerable  tremor  to 
the  lattice-windows.  Happily  Monsieur  was  at  home  this 
time,  and  the  moment  he  looked  out  he  dissipated  all  fears. 

"  Oh!  £«,  they  are  harmless.  I  know  them.  They  are 
enthusiasts,  like  some  of  our  own  people,  and  spoken 
against  everywhere,  too.  You  will  like  to  know  them, 
mother ;  and  though  you  were  to  offend  them  to-morrow, 
and  even  sin  against  their  fine  laws,  as  so  many  English- 
men themselves  do,  they  are  so  enamored  of  peace,  these 
brave  people,  that  they  would  not  cite  you  to  their  courts 
of  justice." 

Monsieur  had  been  either  misinformed  or  had  made  a 
mistake  between  the  Quakers  and  Methodists. 

"  Let  them  come  in,  Priscille,"  he  continued. 

The  chief  peculiarities  of  dress  and  gait  which  had 
struck  the  Dupuy  household  were  in  the  elder  man.  He 
was  stout  and  middle-aged,  with  a  capacious  forehead  and 
violet  eyes,  in  which  there  was  a  wonderful  mixture  of 
observation  and  meditation.  He  had  a  good  composite 
English  irose,  a  full,  flexible  mouth,  and  a  double  chin, 
which  was  yet  nowise  gross.  He  wore  his  own  black  hair, 
which  hung  down  on  each  side  of  his  face  till  it  reached 
his  collarless  coat  and  his  cravat,  and  was  abundantly 
spi'inkled  with  grey,  but  without  any  trace  of  powder. 
lie  had  on  a  broad-brimmed  hat,  like  a  parson's,  but  the 
rest  of  his  dress  did  not  correspond,  being  of  homely,  well- 
worn  velveteen — coat,  vest,  and  breeches,  the  latter  with 
leathern  gaiters.  There  Avasnot  one  item  of  adornment  in 
his  costume,  neither  lace  nor  braid,  shoe-buckle  nor  cravat- 
brooch,  yet  it  was  unmistakably  the  costume  of  a  gentle- 
man.    Nay,  the  "  grand  simple"  in  style,  after  which  some 


THE   IIUGUENOT   FAMILY.  73 

of  the  finest  gentlemen  of  the  day  had  the  taste  to 
hanker,  did  something  to  bring  out  the  unconscious  manly 
dignity  of  a  figure  which  was  in  itself  heavy  and  clumsy  ; 
and  the  perpetual  pondering  on  the  highest  themes  had 
taken  away  from  the  expression  of  the  beautiful  eyes  what 
might  have  been  the  egotism  and  coarse  rusticity  of  a  self- 
taught  country  squire. 

The  strange  gentleman  had  ridden  a  grey  cob  as  stout, 
middle-aged,  and  apparently  as  studiously-inclined  as  him- 
self. As  he  had  ridden,  he  had  read  hi  a  large  book,  with 
brown  calf  binding,  which  lay  open  across  his  horse's  neck, 
and  ambling  along  sedately,  he  had  come  upon  an  interest- 
ing passage  just  as  he  had  reached  the  gate.  Priscille's 
wonderment  and  scorn  had  been  roused  by  his  sitting  stock- 
still  like  a  statue  for  a  few  minutes  to  finish  it  before  alight- 
ing, apparently  with  the  consent  of  his  beast,  too,  while 
his  companion  fastened  the  horse-bridle  in  the  ring  at  the 
garden-door. 

The  younger  man  was  common-looking  in  comparison, 
though  he  was  a  comely  lad,  perhaps  a  little  over  twenty, 
and  bio-  and  broad-shouldered  for  his  aije.  One  could  have 
seen  that  he  was  the  old  man's  son,  though  he  appeared  so 
different,  for  he  had  his  father's  nose,  mouth,  and  chin,  along 
with  a  square,  compact  forehead  of  his  own,  and  eyes  in- 
clining more  to  the  steady  blue  than  the  changing  violet. 
He  was  in  the  dress  of  his  years  and  station:  buckskin 
breeches,  riding-boots,  a  red  vest,  and  large  shining  buttons 
on  his  coat,  while  his  hat  had  one  of  the  numerous  cocks 
which  in  turn  was  given  to  that  important  piece  of  apparel. 
But  though  the  younger  had  all  the  advantage  of  di 
which  the  elder  wanted— though  he  had  youth  and  the 
grace  of  youth  on  his  side,  he  nevertheless  failed  in  the 
special  traits  which  marked  the  other.  His  face  indicated 
breeding,  fair  parts,  spirit,  sense,  modesty,  kindliness,  and 
was  indeed  a  singularly  fresh,  honest,  and  healthful  young 
face,  among  the  many  faces  then  prematurely  wasted  and 
polluted  with  the  hot  flush  of  passion  and  vice.  It  was  a 
face,  too,  in  which  goodliness  seemed  to  be  progressive,  like 
the  slow  growth  of  many  a  bounteous,  fruitful  tree;  but 
one  which,  on  account  of  this  very  slowness,  would  the 
more  readily  recommend  itself  to  English  hearts.  Still,  it 
was  without  either  the  dazzling  gleam  and  glory  of  genius, 

I) 


74  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

or  suggestions  of  individual  and  searching  experiences,  such 
as  excited  the  curiosity  and  commanded  the  interest  of 
every  one  who  looked  upon  the  elder  man. 

The  father  and  son  were  journeying  together  in  such  ' 
cordial  good-fellowship  as  many  a  parent  and  child  might 
have  envied,  though  the  one  was  on  horseback  and  the 
other  on  foot,  and  the  one  studying  in  nnpropitious  circum- 
stances a  volume  of  which  the  other  did  not  care  to  con- 
strue a  line  now  that  his  school  tasks  were  finished.  That 
other  was  studying  the  clouds,  the  flights  of  birds,  the  ef- 
fects of  soils  in  their  growth,  the  rearing  of  colts  and  heif- 
ers ;  and  he  had  not  merely  a  quick  eye  to  what  was  nota- 
ble and  picturesque  in  these  details,  for  he  had  inherited 
that  side  of  his  father's  temperament,  but  had  also  along 
with  it  a  practical  knowledge,  love,  and  assiduity  such  as 
Squire  Gage  of  the  Mall,  with  all  his  wit,  book-lore,  and 
earnestness,  had  never  pretended  to. 

As  Squire  Gage  passed  under  the  roof  of  the  Shottery 
Cottage,  he  raised  his  hat,  and  said,  so  low  and  solemnly 
that  it  seemed  a  movement  of  the  man's  soul,  and  not  a 
form  of  words  from  his  lips :  "  Peace  be  to  this  house !" 
while  his  companion  took  off  his  hat  and  bowed  his  head 
reverently. 

"  You  are  welcome,  gentlemen,"  said  Monsieur,  with  his 
natural  urbanity,  as  he  came  forward,  while  the  women 
made  their  courtesies  ;  "  you  are  welcome  the  more  that  I 
can  not  for  my  life  tell  to  what  I  am  to  attribute  the  honor 
of  this  visit." 

"  You  are  to  take  it,  and  our  most  hearty  service,  sir," 
announced  Squire  Gage,  in  a  deep-toned,  full,  melodious 
voice,  such  as  with  the  early  Methodist  leaders  was  a  direct 
personal  qualification  for  their  work;  "they  form  a  very 
small  acknowledgment  of  the  great  debt  we  owe  to  a  dear 
Mend  of  ours,  and  a  countryman  of  yours,  who  fell  asleep 
too  early  for  his  parish,  his  circuit,  England,  and  Christen- 
dom— Fletcher  of  Madeley.  I  would  fain  hope  I  may  hit 
on  some  precious  memorial  of  my  brother's,  early  friends 
and  his  first  youth  among  his  Protestant  countrymen." 

Monsieur  taxed  his  memory  in  vain.  Even  Grand'mere 
could  not  recall  such  a  one  among  all  the  Elechiers  she  had 
known  or  heard  of,  even  although  one  of  them  had  been  a 
famous  orator,  a  Elechier  who  was  a  6oldier  in  his  youth. 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  75 

had  quitted  the  army,  studied  for  the  Church,  emigrated 
to  England,  and  settled  there,  and  had  come  forward  in 
the  van  of  the  beleaguering  host  of  the  Methodists,  the  he- 
loved  friend  of  its  choicest  spirits,  the  truest  gentleman, 
and  most  faithful  servant  of  his  Master,  England  had  ever 
received  into  her  Church's  ranks. 

But  it  did  Squire  Gage  good  even  to  speak  of  Fletcher 
of  Madeley,  and  of  those  rough  but  brave  days  when  he 
had  known  well-born  gentlemen,  famous  scholars,  impas- 
sioned, meek  Christians,  lodging  in  outhouses  and  barns, 
without  fire  or  candle,  when  they  trudged  along  the  dan- 
gerous roads  with  their  saddle-bags  strapped  on  their 
backs,  brushed  each  other's  shoes  and  washed  each  other's 
potatoes,  preached  forty  hours  in  a  week,  and  prayed  in 
every  house  they  entered,  from  five  of  the  clock  in  the  bit- 
ter winter  mornings  till  past  midnight.  Ay,  he  remem- 
bered those  days,  and  loved  to  think  of  them  too,  when 
they  were  set  upon  by  bull-dogs,  pelted  with  paving-stones, 
and  drummed  out  of  towns  by  the  public  drummer.  It  did 
Squire  Gage  good  to  speak  of  the  gallant  campaign  in 
which  he  had  borne  his  part,  and  it  warmed  his  heart  to 
hear  the  French  tongues  and  to  see  the  French  faces.  So 
Fletcher  of  Madeley  had  spoken  and  felt,  when  he  struggled 
with  his  consumptive  cough  to  address  his  people  for  the 
last  time  ;  so  he  had  looked  when  he  took  otf  his  hat  to  his 
pew-opener ;  and  when  he  plucked  the  cushion  from  his 
pony-chaise  and  presented  it  that  the  fractured  limb  of  the 
savage  yeoman,  who  had  been  his  greatest  enemy,  might 
rest  upon  it. 

There  was  a  freemasonry  between  the  old  Methodist  and 
the  old  Huguenots,  though  they  differed  in  many  impor- 
tant particulars. 

Squire  Gage  spoke  of  the  rise  of  Methodism,  eagerly  but 
simply.  The  deeds  done  had  been  devoted,  gentle,  gener- 
ous deeds,  yet  there  had  been  nothing  wonderful  in  them 
save  the  grace  of  God  vouchsafed  by  his  Son,  and  reflected 
faintly  in  the.  lives  of  men  whose  faces,  when  they  were 
looked  upon  by  the  sympathetic  eyes  of  their  generation, 
seemed  as  though  they  had  been  the  faces  of  angels.  Such 
men  were  the  two  great  brothers,  Mr.  John  ami  Mr. 
Charles  Wesley,  Fletcher,  and  Whitfield.  For  all  that, 
the  last  Squire  Gage  had  opposed  Whitfield,  and  taken  his 


76  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

stand  on  the  Arminian  side  of  the  famous  controversy. 
But  our  squire  had  learned  the  broadest  of  charity  from  a 
broad  experience.  He  had  dealt  with  publicans  and  sin- 
ners of  the  first  water,  with  Sadducees  of  all  grades,  from 
the  heartless  negatives  of  Lord  Chesterfield,  delivered  in 
Louis  Quinze  French,  and  interrupted  by  incomparable 
liftings  of  his  hat  and  takings  of  snuff",  down  to  the  bully- 
ing, blustering,  blaspheming  rodomontade  of  some  Billy 
Blue,  broken  in  upon  by  fierce  squirts  of  tobacco-juice  and 
defiant  hitches  of  his  trowsers  belt.  He  had  encountered 
Pharisees  of  every  rank  and  shade,  from  those  whose  gain 
was  a  bishop's  mitre  down  to  squalid,  railing  men,  whose 
temptation  was  the  miserable  three-pounds-a-quarter  pit- 
tance of  the  traveling  Methodist  preacher.  He  had  known, 
too,  Israelites  without  guile,  whose  mark  had  to  stand  for 
a  signature  ;  and  Israelites  who  burnt  their  Platos  and 
Livys  lest  their  books  should  tempt  them  into  intellectual 
pride,  or  withdraw  them  from  the  narrow  way  in  which 
alone  they  could  walk,  and  save  then-  own  and  their  fellow- 
creatures'  souls.  And  Squire  Gage  was  not  like  Ignatius 
Loyola,  who  vowed  himself  to  the  Virgin,  and  banished 
women  from  the  roll  of  his  order;  for  he  had  known  Maries 
who  had  washed  and  mended  their  rags  in  order  that  they 
might  do  all  things  decently ;  or  had  laid  aside  their  bro- 
cades and  pearl  drops,  and  appeared  forever  afterward  in 
homely  calamanco  and  muslin.  He  had  known  some  who 
had  set  their  diamonds  in  the  unplastercd  walls  of  primi- 
tive chapels,  who  had  given  up  their  cards  for  hymn-books, 
and  announced  their  auctions  that  they  might  provide 
houses  of  refuge  for  the  poverty-stricken,  the  Bick,  and  the 
sinful.  Squire  Gage  had  made  many  such  friends  in  the 
dens  of  great  cities,  in  the  wilds  of  America,  on  shipboard, 
and  at  Moorfields. 

The  squire's  nature  was  so  liberal,  generous,  and  finely 
attuned  to  sympathy,  that  he  made  little  of  his  own  claims 
and  much  of  his  neighbors',  and  so  he  addressed  the  Du- 
puys  with  a  deferential  wave  of  the  hand  and  a  manly 
apology  for  taking  up  the  time  of  the  interview.  "  I  am 
advised  not  to  detain  you  farther  with  my  poor  personal 
narratives;  an  elderly  man  waxes  both  heavy  and  garru- 
lous, :iml  therefore  Mr.  John  warned  his  preachers  not  to 
suffer  the  devil  to  tempt  them  into  long  sermona     But 


THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY.  77 


may  I  beg  the  favor  of  a  few  fresh  particulars  of  your  hon- 
orable history  ?  Indeed,  I  am  credibly  informed  that  you 
have  been  most  blessed  martyrs." 

"  Yes,  indeed,  martyrs  %>ar-ci  and  martyrs  par-Id  ;  but  I 
leave  the  question  of  the  martyrs,"  declared  Monsieur,  in- 
differently.  "  I  say  we  have  been  honest  men  stripped  of 
our  rights  and  privileges,  and  brutally  pillaged  and  out- 
raged, and  that  if  we  pay  our  enemies  back  in  their  own 
money,  they  have  worked  for  their  wages — that  is  all." 

"That  is  to  leave  the  question  of  the  martyrs,  sure 
enough,"  answered  Squire  Gage,  gravely ;  "  for  martyrs, 
and  for  that  matter,  brave,  true  patriots,  do  not  avenge 
themselves.     My  dear  sir,  I  pray  you  think  better  of  it." 

"Ta,  ta,  ta,  my  dear  Monsieur  Gage ;  it  is  my  own  busi- 


ness." 


"I  deny  that,"  asserted  the  squire,  eagerly;  "I  deny 
that  any  man's  business  is  his  own  if  it  be  likely  to  injure 
or  ruin  him,  and  if  it  is  granted  that  he  is  one  of  many 
brethren." 

"Say  it  to  him,  Monsieur,"  adjured  Madame  Dupuy, 
"  when  the  cats  run  on  the  roof  the  mice  dance  on  the 
planks.  Ah  well !  yes,  the  famine  drives  the  wolves  out 
of  the  forest.  My  husband  will  ask  permission  to  blow  his 
nose  on  the  one  hand,  and  he  will  persist  in  following  his 
worldly,  reckless  courses  on  the  other.  All  men  are  De- 
mases  in  these  degenerate  days." 

"Madam!"'  responded  Squire  Gage,  turning  round  in 
mild  astonishment  and  deprecation  upon  the  narrow,  dark 
face,  with  the  rage  of  the  contest  forever  burning  fiercely 
in  it ;  and,  true  to  his  Methodist  principles,  he  rebuked  the 
error.  "I  also  am  a  man,  and  I  have  yet  to  learn  that 
these  days  in  which  we  live  are  degenerate  days.  T  fancy 
they  are  a  mighty  deal  better  than  those  in  which  Mary 
burnt  the  bishops,  or  Elizabeth  fined  the  Puritans,  or  Anne 
thought  of  bringing  back  the  Pope  and  the  Pretender,  or 
your  Charles  and  Catherine  massacred  your  fathers,  or 
your  Louis  sold  them  as  slaves  ;  only  I  conclude  there  has 
been  some  good  in  all  events  and  at  all  Times,  else  <;<><1 
would  not  have  suffered  them,  any  more  than  the  world. 
Moreover,  I  have  read,  both  in  the  law  and  the  Gospel, 
that  the  man  is  the  head  of  his  house;  therefore,  even  al- 
though the  head  were  as  far  wrong  as  you  say,  I  see  not 


78  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY 

that  the  tail  would  have  any  call  to  rise  up  and  lash  its 
own  natural  sovereign." 

"  But  they  tell  me  that  your  sect  allows  the  public  min- 
istry of  women  ?"  questioned  Grand'mere,  partly  to  pro- 
vide for  the  subsiding  of  any  offense  which  might  have 
arisen  from  the  plain-speaking  of  Mr.  Gage.  Such  plain- 
speaking  was  but  small  offense  to  her,  when  there  was 
nothing  in  it  of  the  "  stand  aside,  I  am  holier  than  thou." 
At  the  same  time,  Grand'mere  had  a  vehement  prejudice 
against  the  public  ministry  of  women.  Like  other  French- 
women whose  social  influence  was  immense,  she  was  in- 
clined to  hold  in  aversion  every  independent  influence  ex- 
erted by  women. 

"  Yes,  my  dear  old  dame,"  confirmed  the  squire,  bend- 
ing gladly  to  the  benign  foreign  face  which  was  least 
strange  to  him,  since  it  reminded  him  most  of  the  face  of 
Fletcher  of  Madeley  ;  "  and  we  are  minded  to  say,  though 
it  is  not  a  gallant  saying,  that  if  an  ass  rebuked  Balaam, 
and  a  cock  rebuked  Peter,  surely  a  woman  may  rebuke 
sin." 

"  Certes !  that  is  not  putting  the  similes  too  high,"  ac- 
knowledged Grand'mere,  with  her  silvery  laugh  ;  "  still, 
you  see,  I  have  heard  of  a  certain  epistle  called  Corin- 
thians, and  in  the  epistle  premier  there  is  a  certain  chap- 
ter numero  xiv.,  verses  34  and  35,  where  we  read  some- 
thing on  the  jDreaching  and  the  teaching  of  women ;  now, 
what  of  that,  sir  ?" 

"  We  opine,  madam,  that  the  verses  refer  to  church  gov- 
ernment and  discipline,  and  we  ordain  not,  nor  do  our 
women  presume  that  they  should  settle  the  disputes  in 
our  conferences,  or  control  the  management  of  our  cir- 
cuits. But  to  what  purpose  have  you  women  your  tender 
logic  of  the  heart,  compared  with  which  ours  is  so  tough 
and  dry  ?  For  the  use  of  your  husbands  and  children 
only  ?  Why,  that  is  selfish  at  the  best.  And  what  if 
your  husbands  and  children  do  not  want  it  ?  What  if  yen 
have  neither  husbands  nor  children  ?  You  will  confess 
that  Deborah,  and  not  Lapidoth,  judged  Israel,  and  Anna 
spoke  of  the  child  to  all  who  looked  for  his  coming.  That 
was  before  the  days  of  the  great  Apostle  Paul,  I  grant 
you  ;  but  methinks  he  would  not  have  shut  the  mouths 
of  those  women.     When  I  was  so  happy,  and  my  dame  so 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  79 

much  less  happy  than  she  is  now,  in  that  she  still  abode 
■with  me,  I  used  to  find  that  when  I  spoke  to  a  crowd  of 
fellow-sinners,  more  by  token  when  they  were  poor,  work- 
worn,  dull,  or  distraught  men  and  women,  and  I  was  apt 
to  fly  far  over  their  heads,  my  good  woman  never  came 
after  me  but  she  went  straight  to  their  hearts.  Ah  !  I 
wish  you  could  have  heard  her.  If  you  had  done  so,  you 
would  never  have  controverted  women  speaking  in  the 
cause  of  their  Lord  again.  She  had  Chrysostom's  golden 
mouth,  and  could  lull  and  disarm  the  most  raging  opposi- 
tion of  the  natural  man,  could  overcome  the  most  tor- 
menting, gnawing  worldly  care,  and  turn  the  sneer  of 
the  profane  into  the  worship  of  the  devout,  and  melt  even 
a  heart  of  stone  !  This  her  son,  who  is  not  one  of  our 
preachers,  having  no  gift  that  way,  and  who,  like  you, 
doth  not  much  affect  the  ministry  of  women,  can  tell  you 
what  her  preaching  was  like  ;  and  I  will  say  for  him,  that 
he  is  too  sterling  a  lad  to  overpraise  beyond  his  judg- 
ment even  the  good  mother  that  bore  him." 

Thus  appealed  to,  the  young  man  spoke,  without  hesita- 
tion and  reluctance,  and,  as  it  seemed,  without  favor.  "  It 
is  true  what  my  father  says.  My  mother's  sermons  were 
most  sweet  and  suitable.  I  have  known  few  weary  of  her 
discourse,  and  few  who  were  not  the  better  for  it.  Oth- 
er women  appear  to  me  to  wax  weak  and  distempered, 
and  to  utter  frothy  matter,  or  to  repeat  themselves  ;  but 
my  mother  was  more  reasonable,  collected,  and  concise,  as 
well  as  more  earnest,  genuine,  and  heavenly-minded,  when 
she  was  carried  away  with  her  theme,  than  any  speaker  I 
have  ever  heard;  unless  it  be  one  "whom  truth  and  not 
flattery  compels  me  to  except — yourself,  sir,  in  your  happy 
moments  ;  for  you  know  I  have  not  lived  long  enough  to 
have  ever  heard  Mr.  John  Wesley,  or  Fletcher,  or  Whit- 
field, or  any  of  those  you  term  our  Boanerge-.*' 

"  No,  boy.  But  I  fall  far  short  of  your  mother  ;  I  conir 
not  near  her.  though  I  have  had  so  many  more  years  of 
grace  given  me,  and  so  many  more  years  of  the  practice  of 
preaching,  and  though  you, 'being  her  boy  as  well  as  mine, 
and  s], oiled  by  her  in  that  respect,  wise  as  -lie  was.  are 
too  prone  to  exalt  me." 

"And  yet,  with  two  such  qualified  progenitors, you  do 
not   attempt  the  public  speaking  yourself,  my  young  sir,*' 


80  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

speculated  Monsieur,  a  little  mockingly ;  "  'tis  a  rare  con- 
tinence." 

"I  am  not  fit  for  it,"  declared  the  young  squire,  with  a 
straightforwardness  which  wholly  disarmed  supercilious- 
ness ;  "  I  do  not  wear  the  Methodists'  dress  because  it  would 
be  hypocrisy  in  me,  who  have  not  come  out  of  the  world 
as  they  have  done,  nor,  indeed,  am  persuaded  that  their 
peculiar  separation  from  the  world  ought  to  be  mine  also. 
I  am  good  for  nothing  but  to  take  care  of  my  father's  beast 
when  he  forgets  that  he  carries  a  student  and  a  preacher, 
and  is  like  to  stumble  and  throw  his  rider;  or  to  knock 
down  any  man  who  lays  a  rough  hand  on  a  godly,  benefi- 
cent man,  be  he  a  squire  like  my  father,  or  a  poor  journey- 
man shoe-maker,  a  brother  of  St.  Crispin,  as  my  father  call- 
eth  him,  which  so  many  of  our  traveling  preachers  are — 
whether  there  be  Methodism  in  the  smell  of  the  leather,  or 
any  other  provoking  cause,  I  wot  not." 

"  My  lad,  let  not  the  devil  cause  thee  to  bear  false  wit- 
ness, even  though  it  be  in  decrying  thyself.  Thou  art  eyes 
to  the  blind,  and  feet  to  the  lame,  for  my  eyes  were  never 
good  for  much  but  poring  over  brown  books,  or  peering 
closely  into  men's  faces,  or  scanning  far  off  the  vague  vast 
of  the  sky ;  and  my  feet  hath  my  father's  old  punishment 
of  gout  in  them." 

"  Though  you  gave  up  tea  and  coffee  as  too  stimulating 
and  pampering,  along  with  my  mother  and  Mr.  John  Wes- 
ley, a  score  of  years  agone,"  commented  the  son. 

"  And  you  profess  to  keep  the  farming  of  the  old  Mall 
within  bounds,  when  you  pretend  that  the  agriculture  of 
Virgil  is  wrong  ?" 

"  So  it  is,  sir,"  argued  the  young  squire ;  "  when  you 
apply  what  was  written  for  Northern  Italy,  under  the  Ko- 
mans,  to  Midland  England  under  the  house  of  Brunswick." 

"  Do  you  not  read  Virgil  also,  my  young  sir  ?"  inquired 
Grand'mere,  inquisitively. 

"  No,  madam,  I  am  too  thick  of  the  head,  and  have  too 
much  to  occupy  and  divert  me  at  present.  Perhaps  I  shall 
turn  to  it  when  my  brains  have  grown  with  use,  or  when 
other  trades  fail;  when  I  am  disabled  for  the  active  duties 
and  diversions  for  which  I  am  persuaded  I  am  designed  at 
present,  which  my  father  doth  not  forbid,  and  in  which  I 
do  not  see  any  harm." 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  81 

"  Yea ;  let  every  man  be  fully  persuaded  in  his  own 
mind,"  murmured  Caleb  Gage  the  elder,  "  for  there  are  di- 
vers operations,  but  the  same  Spirit." 

In  the  .mean  time  young  Caleb  Gage  had  been  trying  to 
make  himself  agreeable  to  the  Dupuys,  and  to  improve  the 
acquaintance  of  Yolande  Dupuy,  just  as  he  would  have 
done  with  a  companion  of  his  sisters,  had  he  had  sisters. 
He  had  tried  it  in  various  ways,  and  had  at  last  retired 
foiled  from  the  effort.  He  had  got,  in  reply  to  his  queries, 
which  should  have  interested  any  ordinary  young  girl,  the 
briefest  monosyllables.  Whether  she  liked  Sedge  Pond 
and  its  neighborhood  ? — Whether  she  had  been  in  the  Cas- 
tle Gardens  ? — Whether  she  were  given  to  the  rearing  and 
teaching  of  tame  birds,  as  he  had  heard  tell  French  women 
were,  and  in  that  case  whether  she  would  care  to  have  birds 
snared  for  her?  or  whether  she  were  minded  to  have  the 
pond  dredged  ?  These,  and  such  as  these,  were  the  ques- 
tions with  which  Caleb  Gage  plied  Yolande  unsuccessfully. 
But  he  was  left  utterly  uncertain  whether  Ma'mselle  was 
a  stone  statue  of  a  proper  young  gentlewoman,  as  she  sat 
there  in  her  silk  sack  and  her  great  bow  of  rose  ribbon  on 
her  cap,  a  tinge  of  rose  coming  into  her  white  cheeks  for  a 
second,  and  then  leaving  them  again,  just  to  show  that  she 
was  really  living  flesh,  and  not  dead  marble  ;  or  whether  in 
her  superior  learning  she  scorned  him. 

The  truth  was  that  Yolande,  as  Grand'mere  had  seen, 
was  more  ignorant  of  the  world,  more  strange  to  its  ways, 
and  more  at  a  loss  what  to  say  and  do  than  any  girl  just 
out  of  her  convent.  She  had  hardly  seen  or  spoken  to  any 
man  save  her  father's  associates  in  trade,  who  had  not 
treated  her  as  an  equal,  but  as  a  child.  She  was  certainly 
glad  enough  that  any  body  should  think  so  kindly  of  tin 'in 
as  to  visit  them.  But  she  did  not  know  what  to  make  of 
the  young  squire's  rank  freedom;  and  could  not  tell 
whether  it  was  right  for  him  to  address  her  as  he  did,  or 
whether  he  would  presume  to  address  Dorothy  and  Camilla 
Rolle  with  such  ease,  and  whether  they  would  suffer  it. 

The  visitors  were  invited  to  share  in  a  meal  with  the  in- 
mates of  the  Cottage,  and  this  invitation  they  accepted 
with  polite  alacrity,  and  without  any  objections,  save  that 
Squire  Gage  quietly  declined  to  drink  healths,  saying  that 
he  had  prayed  for  the  company  already,  and  would  pray  for 

D  2 


82  THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

and  with  them  again  whenever  they  liked,  but  that  neither 
he  nor  any  other  Methodist  would  pledge  a  bumper,  any 
more  than  they  would  pour  out  a  libation.  Shortly  after 
the  meal  was  over,  father  and  son  took  their  departure. 
.  The  Gages  had  inspired  a  sentiment  in  the  inmates  of 
the  Cottage  more  akin  to  good-will  than  the  Rolles  had 
been  able  to  do  on  first  acquaintance.  Grand'mere  was 
especially  pleased  with  them,  and  was  not  guiltless  of 
forming  her  own  projects  and  building  her  own  castles  in 
the  air,  even  on  so  short  an  acquaintance — projects  in 
which  the  Gages,  father  and  son,  figured  largely. 

"  Grand'mere,"  interrupted  Yolande,  "  did  you  observe 
Mr.  Gage's  eyes,  which  are  short-sighted  ?  They  are  like 
nothing  but  the  evening  star  when  the  dew  is  falling." 

"  Yes,  little  one,  and  I  have  seen  eyes  like  them  in  the 
long  past ;  eyes  with  a  short  sight  for  the  present,  and  a 
far  sight  for  the  future.  No  marvel  that  they  are  both 
unfathomable  and  effulgent,  for  they  have  done  as  great 
things  as  the  Italian  who  went  down  into  the  Inferno — 
they  have  looked  into  eternity,  these  eyes,  and  it  is  re- 
flected in  their  glance." 


CHAPTER  Vm. 

GRAND'MERE    TURNS    MISER — AN   EMBASSY   TO    THE    MALL 

SORTES    BIBLIC.E. 

Grand'mere,  with  all  her  inward  peace,  had  a  care  on 
her  mind,  the  more  imperative  that  it  was  tender.  But 
after  the  Gages  had  introduced  themselves  at  the  Shottery 
Cottage,  she  did  not  so  much  shake  off  the  care  as  find 
that  the  solution  of  the  problem  took  a  tangible  shape,  and 
became  to  her  sanguine  temper  and  ardent  imagination 
more  and  more  practicable  and  probable. 

Then  Grand'mere  sought  with  some  formality  a  special 
interview  with  Monsieur,  her  son,  and  communicated  her 
intentions  to  him. 

Monsieur  laughed  a  little,  even  at  his  mother,  in  this 
case,  for  Grand'mere's  care  bulked  so  slightly  in  his  mind, 
that  it  appeared  a  very  bagatelle,  weighed  in  the  scale 
against  his  obligations.     But  he  admitted  there  was  some 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  83 

foundation  for  her  concern,  and  he  gave  his  mother  carte 
blanche  to  do  what  she  could  to  remove  the  cause. 

"I  leave  it  to  you, ma  mere;  it  is  your  affair.  I  be- 
lieve these  are  honest  people,  and  the  liaison  may  be 
agreeable  to  them  (since  there  is  no  inequality  of  fortune, 
when  they  have  wasted  the  better  part  of  their  patrimony 
on  alms-deeds)  for  the  sake  of  you,  little  mother,  and  their 
hero  —  this  Monsieur,  I  do  not  know  who  —  Flechier. 
As  to  the  tourterelle,  she  may  do  as.  well  with  them  as 
with  others.  She  abuses  the  English,  that  poor  child  ; 
but  she  has  not  even  the  debonnairete  of  these  droles  the 
pastor's  daughters.  Psch!  Yolande's  blood  is  cold,  and 
her  color  grey,  like  the  English  climate  and  sky,  which  I 
do  not  abuse ;  she  has  the  spleen,  the  unfortunate !  the 
English  form  of  the  excellent  mother's  faith — tristesse, 
chagrin.     Is  it  not  true,  my  mother  ?" 

"  All  the  waters  run  to  the  river  my  son."  replied 
Grand'mei'e,  with  a  shade  of  impatience  and  indignation. 
"Whom  should  the  child  resemble  unless  her  near  rela- 
tions ?  But  she  is  a  good  child,  a  noble  child,  word  of  mine, 
Hubert.  There  are  men  and  women  who  know  their  kind, 
that  would  give  more  for  the  truth,  and  for  the  earnest- 
ness, all  sombre  as  yet,  of  our  Yolande,  than  for  the  light, 
treacherous  frivolity,  and  the  natures  all  egotism  and  all 
passion,  of  the  girls  of  the  world." 

"Ouais!  She  is  severe.  I  have  never  heard  her  called 
so  before.  The  nursling  is  very  near  thy  heart,  Grand'- 
mere." 

"  Because  you  have  a  diamond,  and  you  do  not  know  it, 
papa  Dupuy.  You  embark  what  remains  of  your  good 
head  and  heart  in  ventures  and  schemes  alone.  The  good 
Philippine  is  not  altogether  wrung.  Yet  you  have  bread, 
and/W^e  also,  already.  You  are  better  off  than  most  of 
our  emigres,  and  you  can  not  even  spare  time  to  get  a 
glimpse  of  your  diamond,  though  you  are  aware  that  it  is 
the  pure  and  precious  diamond,  which  is  rough  and  dark 
in  the  mine,  till  it  is  brought  to  the  light  and  cut,  ready 
to  be  set  in  the  crown  of  a  king." 

"I  have  had  a  diamond  all  my  days, my  old  woman,  cut 
and  polishe  dbefore  I  ever  looked  upon  it  ;  and  it  is  not 
true  that  I  have  not  noticed  it.  and  valued  it,  when  it 
alone  had  sent  radiance  into  the  dark  places  thousands  of 


84  TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

times.  But  I  am  too  old,  too  bourgeois,  and  have  yet  too 
many  rivals  to  overcome  in  trade,  which  is  my  calling,  to 
want  another  diamond,  or  to  cut  it  off  for  myself;  and  you 
women,  born  religieuses,  will  not  understand  such  things. 
I  shall  take  it  on  trust,  if  you  please,  and  I  shall  leave  you 
to  dispose  of  it,  to  bestow  it  to  shine  (poor  little  diamond ! 
the  sun  to  it,  with  all  my  heart)  in  another  house,  and 
show  myself  the  son  of  my  mother  in  this  liberality — and 
I  can  not  help  that  defect  altogether,  since  I  happen  to  be 
one  of  the  rude,  hard,  worldly  betes  of  men  whom  poor 
Philippine  rails  at.  Go  !  let  her  rail,  if  it  does  her  good, 
what  does  it  signify  ?" 

Grand'niere  bade  Yolande  go  and  aid  big  Priscille,  as 
she  wished  to  speak  with  her  mother ;  and  she  consulted 
Madame  so  soon  as  Monsieur  had  retired  to  his  study,  or 
rather  his  business-room. 

And  Madame  said  she  did  not  love  the  English  ;  she  did 
not  trust  them ;  she  would  rather  see  the  mortal  remains 
of  Yolande  in  English  earth  than  that  the  immortal  spirit 
of  the  child  should  forget  and  forsake  the  faith  of  the 
French  soil,  for  which  her  ancestors  had  watered  the  land 
with  their  best  blood.  As  to  Lutheranism,  it  was  a  tan- 
tamarre  of  Protestantism;  Methodism  might  be  better 
but  she  did  not  like  the  tree  on  which  the  fruit  grew.  At 
the  same  time,  it  was  true  that  a  girl  could  not  be  left 
alone  to  face  the  dangers  and  the  temptations  of  the 
world.  There  were  no  French  parents  who  would  not 
seek  in  good  time  the  protection  of  another's  house  and 
home  for  a  young  maiden.  Monsieur  would  bring  them 
all  to  the  Bastille  of  England,  or  to  the  horse-pond,  some 
day.  Ah !  she  begged  Grand'niere's  pardon  for  speak- 
ing disrespectfully  of  her  son.  She  had  forgotten  for  the 
moment  that  her  husband  was  Grand'mere's  son,  and^xj^'te 
mere  should  not  go  to  the  Bastille.  She  was  too  venera- 
ble, too  near  the  saints.  Petite  mere  should  go  with  Yo- 
lande. Monsieur  would  not  allow  it  otherwise,  and  she 
would  not  allow  it ;  for  it  would  be  undutiful  and  unkind 
to  the  dear  old  mother.  No,  she  alone  would  accompany 
Monsieur,  and  perhaps  the  sooner  the  better,  if  it  brought 
him  to  a  right  mind,  to  faith  and  repentance. 

"  My  Philippine,  thou  art  honorable  and  devout  to  the 
finger-tips;    but  thou  art  not  a  trooper.     No!  thou  art 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  85 

weak  as  water,  with  the  throes  of  passion,  like  many  anoth- 
er poor  woman,  my  child.  If  thon  wouldst  only  have 
faith  in  the  good  God,  and  fervent  charity  toward  men," 
adjured  Grand'mere,  with  commiseration.  "  But  never- 
theless chagrin  is  in  the  humors  of  the  blood,  my  love,  I 
believe  it  well ;  and  we  when  judge  harshly,  very  often  we 
should  do  better  to  have  great  pity." 

Madame  would  have  infinitely  preferred  to  transplant 
Yolande  into  a  French  household,  but  at  Sedge  Pond  the 
Dupuys  were  isolated  from  their  countrymen,  save  in  the 
case  of  those  business  men  whom  Madame  looked  upon  as 
denaturalized  renegades,  the  accomplices  of  Monsieur's 
Mammon  -  worship  and  plotting  ambition.  Then  there 
was  just  enough  of  the  bourgeoise  in  Madame  to  be  sensi- 
ble of  the  disadvantage  of  having  bread  without  fripe,  as 
was  true  of  the  mass  of  the  Huguenot  emigres,  and  the 
consequent  temptation  when  bread  andfripe  were  offered 
to.  them  to  lick  the  frlpe  on  their  own  account,  and,  so  far 
as  faithful  regard  and  abiding  friendship  were  concerned, 
leave  the  bread  to  take  its  own  chance,  and  to  be  trampled 
under  foot  in  the  crowd  of  other  relations  and  interests. 
Thus  while  Madame  groaned  in  spirit,  as  she  did  over 
most  proposals  which  were  made  to  her,  she  saw  no  reason 
for  treating  what  had  the  great  weight  of  Grand'mere's 
wish  as  rank  apostasy  and  villainy. 

Thus  Grand'mere,  in  her  sweet  cracked  voice,  began  to 
sinsr,  over  her  cookinsr,  distillino:,  lace-weaving,  not  Clement 
Marot's  psalms  alone,  though  she  sang  them  oftenest  and 
with  most  satisfaction,  but  old  ballads  and  folk-songs, 
which  were  like  drops  of  the  nation's  heart,  that  she  had 
never  despised  and  never  forgotten,  and  which  now  came 
to  her,  in  green,  misty  England,  with  touches  of  the  varied 
colors  and  wafts  of  the  sweet  odors  of  the  south. 

Grand'mere  also  suddenly  developed  a  passion  for  coins, 
especially  for  gold  pieces — canary  birds  as  she  called 
them.  She  was  evidently  making  a  collection  of  them, 
and  hoarding  as  many  sovereigns  as  she  could  come  by. 
When  Yolande  sought  the  reason  of  this,  Gran<Tmere  put 
her  off  with  the  pleasantry  that  she  was  becoming  avari- 
cious in  her  old  age,  and  was  scraping  together  a  "little 
fortune  to  leave  Yolande  an  heiress." 

But  Grand'mere  made  a  bad  miser,  for  Prisoille  came  in 


86  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

and  told  her  a  sad  story  of  a  poor  spendthrift  prodigal 
gentleman,  a  stranger,  who  had  come  with  his  wife,  a  for- 
lorn fine  lady,  and  hidden  their  heads  from  the  shame  of 
witnessing  an  execution  in  their  own  house,  under  the 
roof  of  the  ale-house  of  Sedge  Pond.  They  were  not  able 
to  go  any  farther,  or  try  any  new  mode  of  life,  because 
they  had  not  the  money  to  pay  for  their  entertainment, 
and  they  were  now  in  such  a  strait  that  the  gentleman 
had  threatened  to  hang  or  drown  himself.  Then  Grand'- 
mere stole  secretly  out,  with  the  help  of  Madame  Rouge- 
ole,  solicited  the  honor  of  being  allowed  to  wait  on  the 
couple,  and  proposed,  in  a  roundabout,  ingenious  way,  to 
offer  them  a  little  loan,  as  if  it  were  an  agreeable  scheme 
of  putting  out  at  interest  a  portion  of  her  thousands  of 
spare  francs  and  crowns.  On  the  strength  of  this  loan  she 
was  privileged  to  see  the  helpless  couple  go  away  in  the 
coach,  to  throw  themselves  on  the  much-tried  mercy  of 
such  older,  wiser,  and  better  supplied  friends  as  might  be 
left  to  them,  but  with  small  prospect  to  Grand'mere  of 
ever  seeing  her  canary  birds  again. 

Grand'mere's  indemnification  was  the  half-affronted  rec- 
ollection of  how  the  theatrical,  fine  gentleman,  with  his 
unpowdered  hair  hanging  like  candle-wicks  over  his  face, 
and  his  velvet  coat  stained  and  soiled,  had  wished  to 
kneel  to  her,  and  she  had  quickly  prevented  him : 

"  No,  sir,  kneel  to  your  God." 

And  when  he  had  stared,  looked  foolish,  and  shrugged 
his  shoulders,  she  had  been  compelled  to  cry — 

"  Do  you  not  know  Him  ?  Have  you  never  kneeled  to 
Him?  What  marvel  that  every  thing  has  gone  wrong 
with  you,  even  till  you  have  come  to  perish  with  hunger?" 

Afterward  the  felloAV  had  insisted  on  kissing  Grand'- 
mere's hand,  and  vowed  that  as  she  had  done  more  for  him 
than  all  his  friends  among  the  quality,  for  her  sake  he 
would  never  bet,  or  game,  or  race,  or  swear  more,  strike 
him  dead  if  he  would. 

And  Grand'mere  stopped  her  ears,  put  her  hand  on  his 
bold  mouth,  and  cried  dolefully  to  the  prodigal,  who  was 
not  yet  five-and-twenty — 

"  If  thou  canst  not  keep  thyself  from  sin  for  God's  sake 
and  thine  own,  how  thinkest  thou  that  thou  canst  have 
strength  to  do  it  for  the  sake  of  an  old  Huguenot  ?     Nay, 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  87 

leave  off  these  big  promises,  and  look  to  thy  wife,  whom 
thou  hast  taught  to  game  and  bet  as  furiously  as  thyself. 
Behold  the  cards  and  spadille  hidden  in  thy  cuff,  as  if  that 
were  thy  chief  care  and  the  work  for  thy  last  moments; 
and  I  heard  her  wagering  the  lace  of  her  cap  against  the 
braid  of  your  coat  that  I  was  the  hostess  come  to  crave 
you  again,  as  I  mounted  the  stairs.  She  is  frightened  to 
contradict  you,  I  see  it  in  her  eyes,  but  she  shrinks  from 
starvation  and  infamy,  and  from  lawless  violence.  Oh  ! 
do  you  not,  my  pauvrette  ?  Then  go,  my  mirliflore  of  a 
debtor,  and  promise  to  me  not  at  all,  but  perform  a  little 
to  save  that  lost  child  whom  thou  hast  helped  to  drag  to 
the  brink  of  the  precipice.  Yet,  not  even  for  her,  no,  not 
even  for  her,  wilt  thou  pause  and  think,  and  play  the  man 
until  it  is  too  late,  unless  thou  canst  arise  and  go  to  thy 
Father." 

The  sinner  went  at  last,  his  head  hanging  a  little.  It 
was  exceedingly  doubtful,  however,  whether,  unless  in  the 
exhaustless  hopefulness  of  Grand'mere,  he  would  not  be 
sneering  at  her  before  he  had  turned  the  corner.  "  But 
what  of  that  ?"  Grand'mere  would  have  asked.  "  Behold 
the  dark  silent  night,  when  he  may  think  better  of  it. 
Behold  the  moments  of  trial,  anguish,  terror,  alas !  alas ! 
coming  thick  and  fast  on  such  as  he,  when,  while  there  is 
still  mercy  for  him,  he  may  recall  even  so  poor  a  lesson." 

Grand'mere  returned  to  the  Shottery  Cottage,  and  look- 
ed a  little  ruefully  at  her  empty  purse,  the  canaries  all  tied 
from  it.  Eventually  she  consoled  herself  with  the  simple 
reflection  that  money  was  one  thing,  and  men  and  women 
another;  and  that  failing  the  gold  there  was  always  the 
copper,  which  was  only  a  metal  a  little  redder  in  color  and 
heavier  in  weight.  If  Yolande  could  not  have  a  dozen  louis 
in  her  pocket  one  day,  she  might  have  a  dozen  of  dozen  of 
sous,  which  would  be  a  great  deal  grander  in  point  of  num- 
ber, for  the  sake  of  her  dear  old  France  and  its  discreet, 
economical  country  customs. 

Yolande,  girl  as"  she  was,  had  her  thoughts  and  suspi- 
cions in  the  middle  of  her  constant  questioning,  pondering, 
and  disputing;  but  they  were  single-hearted,  submissive, 
and  child-like.  And  when  the  crisis  arrived  for  Grand'- 
mere to  make  known  her  intention  of  going  alone  on  an 
expedition  to  the  Mall,  to  return  the  \  i-it  of  Squire  Gage, 


88  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Yolande  cast  down  her  eyes,  shrank  a  little  more  into  her- 
self, looked  colder  and  graver  in  tone,  and  more  nervous 
and  timid,  a  new  phase  of  her  quietness  and  gravity ;  but 
she  did  not  dream  of  so  much  as  suggesting  opposition  to 
Grand'mere's  enterprise.  There  would  have  been  indeli- 
cacy and  insubordination,  even  according  to  Grand'mere's 
standard,  in  such  a  step  on  Yolande's  part. 

Grand'mere  had  had  so  few  opportunities  of  visiting,  and 
had  so  seldom  availed  herself  of  them  for  many  years,  that 
she  declared  it  made  her  old  head  light,  when  she  started 
on  one  of  the  rector's  horses,  which  was  borrowed  for  the 
occasion.  Madame  Rolle  had  offered  the  use  of  her  char- 
ion,  but  Grand'mere  had  that  honorable  pride  which  would 
have  nothing  to  do  with  what  was  out  of  keeping  with  her 
real  position.  She  was  an  old  bourgeoise  Huguenot ;  her 
pride,  so  far  as  it  was  permissible,  lay  in  that  distinction. 
She  did  not  care  -to  be  rolling,  or  rather  bumping  heavily 
along  the  bad  roads,  like  the  quality.  She  accepted  the 
attendance  of  Black  Jasper,  however,  because  she  wanted 
a  man  to  walk  by  her  horse.  She  thought  it  would  be  a 
mutual  advantage,  and  a  kind  of  treat  to  the  poor  fellow, 
who  wore  a  bit  of  crape  for  Captain  Philip  round  his  arm 
soldier- wise,  which  he  had  begged  one  of  the  rectory  still- 
maids  to  sew  on  for  him ;  and  he  never  passed  the  rector 
without  trying  to  cover  it  clumsily  with  his  hand,  or  his 
hat,  or  his  napkin,  as  if  that  would  cover  a  father's  grief. 
He  never  glanced  at  it  himself  without  his  rolling  eyes  get- 
ting dim.  But  if  Grand'mere  was  as  elated  as  a  child  at 
her  new  circumstances,  she  had  a  child's  generosity  in  seek- 
ing to  share  them  with  her  neighbors.  She  desired  to  do 
Priscille's  business  and  the  business  of  every  other  house- 
wile  who  would  trust  her,  at  the  wheel-wright's  and  the 
miller's  on  the  road.  She  sat  equipped  for  starting  full  ten 
minutes,  to  allow  Black  Jasper  to  enjoy  the  spectacle  of  a 
man  and  an  ape  performing  before  the  ale-house  porch. 

At  last  Grand'mere  set  out  to  ride  her  six  miles  and 
back.  On  she  went  by  the  Waiiste,  past  an  occasional 
windmill,  which  struck  her  as  being  the  likest  feature  to 
France  in  the  landscape  ;  on  by  another  rural  village  much 
in  the  style  of  Sedge  Pond.  She  passed  farm-houses,  con- 
fused masses  of  out-buildings,  only  a  little  less  sluttish  than 
the  villages,  forsaken  by  their  occupants  for  the  harvest- 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  89 

work  in  the  fields.  She  got  gleams  of  the  great  white 
stuccoed  arcade  of  the  Rolles'  castle,  which  carried  the 
rampant  imagination  of  Grand'mere  to  the  Louvre  at  the 
least.  And  always  journeying  with  her  there  was  the  same 
slow,  sleepy  river,  like  a  canal,  bearing  a  barge  or  two, 
bound  for  Norwich. 

Grand'mere  and  Black  Jasper  traveled  in  the  greatest 
harmony.  They  were  not  without  annoyances,  however. 
The  children  of  the  strange  village,  who  had  never  seen  a 
black  servant  before,  but  who  had,  nevertheless,  arrived  at 
the  conclusion  that  his  name  was  Black-a-more,  came  out 
and  stared,  pointed  their  fingers,  screamed,  and  mocked  at 
Black  Jasper,  who  was  naturally  oppressed  by  these  atten- 
tions ;  and  the  little  gall  that  was  in  him  being  roused,  he 
made  faces,  and  threatened  the  small  fry  in  hurried,  im- 
pressive pantomime. 

"  Seest  thou  not,  my  son,  that  it  is  of  no  use  ?  Thou  at- 
tractest  them  only  the  more.  Heed  them  not.  If  they 
did  not  stare  and  shout  at  thee,  they  would  stare  and 
shout  at  me — at  my  French  tongue,  at  the  fashion  of  my 
grey  hair,  and  the  cut  of  my  mantua." 

Black  Jasper  ruminated  on  the  beautiful  old  lady's  call- 
ing him  her  son,  and  comparing  him  to  herself;  and  be- 
came so  inflated  with  conceit,  that  the  next  time  he  Avas 
assailed  by  his  too  ardent  admirers,  he  raised  his  cocked 
hat,  made  a  low  bow,  and  then  spreading  out  his  sable 
fingers  on  his  white  shirt,  saluted  their  tips  till  the  chil- 
dren cried,  "  Boo !  boo!  lulliberoo !"  more  loudly  and  fran- 
tically than  ever,  and  Grand'mere,  it  must  be  confessed, 
was  slightly  scandalized  at  her  train. 

The  Mall  was  a  square  building  of  red  brick  with  white 
facings,  like  a  soldier's  uniform  of  scarlet  cloth  and  pipe- 
clay. It  had  not  only  done  good  private  service  in  iis 
day— had  not  only  held  in  its  oak  and  cedar  parlors  whole 
generations  of  the  Gages  from  the  reign  of  Anne,  and  had 
hidden  priests  of  all  denominations  in  the  hole  behind  the 
chimney  of  the  dining-hall,  which  was  a  fragmenl  of  an 
older  building — but  it  had  seen  public  service  lately.  It 
was  an  old  seat  in  the  modest  rank  <>f  English  country 
mansions,  and  it  was  a  Methodist  establishment,  combining 
college  (on  the  principle  of  Kings  wood),  orphanage,  hospice 
for  belated  travelers,  hospital  for  the   helpless  sick,  and 


90  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

house  of  refuge  for  the  homeless  poor.     All  its  buildings 
and  pleasure-grounds,  which  were  not  absolutely  required 
in  the  economy  of  its  large  household,  were  transformed 
from  their  original  aims,  and  pressed  into  the  use  of  a  mot- 
ley regiment.     The  hall  was  a  meeting-house  and  class- 
room, where  preachers  and  teachers  lectured  and  taught; 
the  stable  was  almost  stripped  of  its  stalls,  while  the  loft 
above  was  fitted  up  into  humble  dormitories.     The  coach- 
house was  the  hospital,  and  an  old  berline  which  still  stood 
in  a  corner  served  as  the  refractory  ward  for  an  occasional 
violent  patient.     The  kennels  were  workshops,  in  which 
traveling    tailors,  shoe-makers,  and    basket-makers    made 
periodical  sojourns,  and  found  apprentices  ready  to  their 
hands ;  while  a  company  of  young  girls  was  distributed, 
under    capable,  vigilant   matrons,  over   the   kitchen,  the 
wash-house,  the  bake-house,  the  dairy,  and  the  housekeep- 
er's room.    In  addition  to  the  Methodist  preachers,  in  every 
degree  of  training,  whom  Squire  Gage  housed,  fed,  clad, 
sent  out  and  followed  with  never-failing  interest  into  their 
circuits  of  evangelization,  the  Mall  was  well  stocked  with 
poor  relations,  who  chose  to  make  it  their  head-quarters 
on  the  right  of  charity's  beginning  at  home.     The  only 
stipulation  with  them  was  that  they  should  attend  the  ex- 
ercises, comply  with  the  regulations  of  the  house,  and  con- 
duct themselves  with  propriety  while  they  were  under  its 
roof.     Along  with  the  regular  pensioners  Squire  Gage  took 
in  an  irre^iilar  band.     Any  number  of  chance  wayfarers, 
who  preferred  a  dish  of  groats  and  a  crust  with  a  grace 
said  to  it,  clean  straw,  and  the   shelter  of  a  roof,  to  the 
highway,  a  grudged  shed,  and  the  pence  demanded  for  the 
humblest  supper  and  bed  at  the  ale-house,  were  also  taken 
in  at  the  Mall  and  made  welcome. 

Thus  Grand'mere  did  not  find  the  country  house,  bask- 
ing sluggishly  in  the  afternoon  sun,  solitary,  save  for  its 
two  masters  and  their  domestics;  on  the  contrary,  it  over- 
flowed with  life  in  all  ranks  and  at  all  stages.  From  a 
wagon  before  the  porch,  two  little  boys,  in  corduroys  and 
knee-breeches,  were  just  alighting.  They  had  rusty  bands 
of  crape  round  their  bonnets,  and  were  very  thin-faced  and 
watery-eyed — a  consignment  a  brother  Methodist  in  the 
next  large  town  had  sent  to  fill  up  two  vacancies  in  Brother 
( l-age'fl  orphanage.    There  was  a  figure  wrapped  in  a  blan- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  91 

ket,  and  taken  straight  to  the  hospital,  as  like  to  be  a 
patient  in  small-pox  as  any  thing  else.  There  was  a  halt 
man  in  a  frieze  coat ;  a  blind  woman  in  a  duffle  cloak,  with 
the  hood  drawn  over  her  head ;  and  a  scarecrow  of  an  old 
gentlewoman,  in  a  gipsy  bonnet  and  a  roquelaure,  claim- 
ing i-emote  kindred  with  Squire  Gage,  and  cumbered  with 
so  many  trunks  and  bandboxes  that  she  certainly  meant 
to  push  her  claim  to  the  extent  of  spending  the  remainder 
of  her  days  at  the  Mall,  while  she  looked  sourly  at  the  halt 
and  the  blind,  as  if  dreading  that  there-  might  not  be  bread 
enough  and  to  spare  for  her  and  for  them.  There  were 
all  imaginable  noises,  the  sound  of  planes,  saws,  resined 
strings,  and  voices  from  the  workshop. 

Elderly  women  and  half-grown  girls,  precise,  and  only 
curbed  in  their  sauciness,  were  moving  to  and  fro  in  the 
porch,  at  the  windows  of  the  house,  and  on  the  landing- 
places  of  the  outside  stairs,  engaged  in  scouring,  mending, 
preparing  meals,  attending  to  the  dumb  animals,  and  wait- 
ing on  those  who  could  not  wait  on  themselves.  A  beggar 
was  examining  his  wallet ;  a  hawker  sorting  his  stock  of 
ballads;  an  okl  soldier  was  airing  his  patched  and  laded 
uniform,  a  scar  on  his  wrinkled  forehead.  But  each  was 
at  his  ease,  and  exhibited  an  inclination  to  growl  at  and 
grudge  elbow-room  to  his  neighbor  in  the  ivied  court. 
Itinerant  preachers,  in  the  elevation  of  their  calling,  were 
studying,  by  the  help  of  books  and  papers,  apart  from  the 
throng,  or  discussing  together  for  the  most  part  doctrines, 
creeds,  and  experiences,  sometimes  with  a  Avar  of  words 
rising,  ebbing,  raging,  falling.  Students  and  disputants 
paced  up  and  down,  and  rested  in  the  walks,  arbors,  and 
summer-houses  of  what  had  once  been  the  gardens  in  which 
the  ladies  of  the  Mall  had  taken  delight,  while  the  men  had 
rejoiced  in  their  hunters  and  harriers,  their  hunting  break- 
fasts and  coursing  dinners.  The  late  Dame  Gage,  though 
she  had  loved  flowers  with  the  best  flower-lovers  among 
her  predecessors,  had  voluntarily  and  cheerfully  given  o^  ti- 
ller garden  to  pass  into  the  commonest  of  kitchen  and  of 
physic  gardens,  for  the  behoof  of  the  greal  family  at  the 
.Mali.  Only  here  and  there,  a  tiger-lily  or  a  nectarine  \»  I 
struggled  into  stately  gorgeous  flower  or  Luscious  fruit,  like 
plants  of  another  age  and  region,  among  coarse  beans  and 
cabbages,  chamomiles  and  hoarhound,  gnarled  orabs  and 


92  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

plums.     And  Grand'mere  bailed  a  huge  walnut-tree,  which 

continued  to  shade  one  corner ;  and  she  hung  over  the 
straggling  tendrils  and  leaves  of  a  wilding  vine,  for  it  was 
such  as  she  had  known  grow  trim  and  fair  and  fruitful  in 
hundreds  of  tender  green,  olive,  and  straw-colored  saplings 
in  her  vineyard  in  Languedoc. 

She  looked  round  without  misgiving,  and  with  sympa- 
thetic interest  in  the  extraordinary  colony.  "When  Squire 
Gage  was  apprised  of  her  arrival,  he  hastened  to  welcome 
her  with  the  warmest  cordiality,  and  received  her  with  the 
greatest  honor.  He,  however,  had  no  other  apartment  to 
which  to  conduct  her,  save  the  kitchen  and  parlor  in  one, 
where  elm-wood  dresser,  birch-wood  settles,  cherry-wood 
cupboards,  pewter  flagons,  box-wood  bowls,  and  dishes  of 
coarsest  earthenware,  did  duty  for  fine  furniture,  and 
which  was  the  only  company  -  room  left  at  the  Mall. 
Grand'mere  looked  round  her  with  more  than  perfect  ac- 
quiescence— with  glad  approval.  She  trod  like  a  queen  on 
a  progress,  when  Mr.  Gage  led  her,  after  she  had  rested, 
over  his  wonderful  human  laboratory.  She  went  with 
him  into  what  he  called  the  aeademicia,  into  the  porticoes, 
the  hall,  and  the  garden,  and  heard  him  help  aspiring  boys, 
sons  of  poor  Nonconformist  ministers  and  school-masters, 
to  construe  Sallust  and  solve  Euclid,  as  they  had  begun  to 
do  in  the  intervals  of  "  lashing"  out  the  corn  on  the  shell- 
ing hill,  and  walking  in  the  farrow  of  the  plough  at  their 
homes.  She  saw  him  pull  the  locks  of  others,  and  bid 
them  not  smuggle  away  their  "  Seven  Champions"  and 
"  Iiobinson  Crusoes,"  for  his  good  brother  Adam  Clarke 
had  demonstrated  beyond  contradiction  that  from  nursery 
fairy-tales  and  school-boy  legends  he  had  learnt  what  had 
served  to  help  his  faith  in  the  invisible,  and  to  teach  him 
to  endure  hardness  %s  a  good  soldier  of  the  greatest  and 
best  of  Lords.  lie  took  Grand'mere  from  workshoj)  to 
hospital,  charming  her  by  his  unconscious  power  of  wis- 
dom and  love  in  their  management ;  and  she  delighted 
him  by  disarming  the  hostility  of  the  crowd  of  performers 
whom  his  hand — practiced  in  blessing — ruled  harmonious- 
ly, bat  who  were  liable  to  prove  unruly  and  contentious 
under  any  other  leader,  and  to  resent  keenly  the  suspicion  of 
an  interloper.  But  Grand'mere  praisedright  and  (eft  in  all 
good-will,  first  frankly  acknowledging  the  merits  of  sor- 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  93 

rel  salve  and  elderberry  wine,  of  goose  pie  and  blackber- 
ry pudding,  and  then  she  presented  a  box  of  French  un- 
guent for  wounds  and  bruises,  and  a  case  of  cassia  ;  finally 
she  begged  a  saucepan,  six  beaten  eggs,  six  bits  of  butter 
the  size  of  a  nut  (telling  them  the  French  cook's  proverb 
was, "  Spare  neither  butter  nor  care"),  a  little  shredded  basil 
and  thyme,  and  a  little  grated  ham,  a  pinch  of  pepper  and 
salt,  and  tossed  in  a  trice  before  their  eyes  that  "omelette 
aux  fines  herbes"  the  very  naming  of  which  is  sufficient 
to  improvise  an  appetite  hi  the  sickliest  of  convalescents. 

But  there  were  other  relics  of  the  original  gentle  estate 
and  destination  of  the  Mall,  beyond  its  stone  and  wood 
work.  The  principal  of  these  w*ere  the  books  of  its  mas- 
ter's library,  in  the  ancient  dignity  of  vellum  and  calf- 
skin, still  stored  in  book-cases  at  one  end  of  the  kitchen ; 
and  the  family  pictures,  which  yet  looked  strangely  down, 
in  the  pink  of  proud  and  affected  attitudes  and  attire,  from 
a  high  whitewashed  open  gallery  running  round  the  room, 
on  the  bustle  below. 

Squire  Gage  explained  that  he  had  once  entertained  se- 
rious thoughts  of  burning  his  books,  as  the  hearers  of  the 
Apostle  Paul  did  theirs ;  or  at  least,  of  selling  them  like 
other  luxuries,  for  what  money  they  would  bring  into  the 
treasury  of  the  establishment.  But  then,  again,  he  had 
considered  that  his  old  friends  and  faithful  companions 
contained  no  magical  arts,  and  he  had  spared  them,  as  he 
was  thankful  for  afterward.  The  longer  lie  lived,  the  more 
fully  he  was  assured  that  a  man  should  be  thoroughly  fur- 
nished to  every  good  work,  and  that  there  was  no  famish- 
ing, after  the  inspiration  of  the  Spirit  and  the  teaching  of 
Holy  Scripture,  which  was  to  be  compared  with  the  clouded, 
corrupted  wisdom  of  the  ancients,  so  that  a  man's  eye  was 
purged  to  see  through  the  dimness  of  their  vision.  And 
if  a  man's  eye  remained  without  light,  why  then  both  the 
wisdom  and  the  folly  of  the  ancients  and  them  oderns  would 
be  all  one  to  him  in  his  darkness.  His  lad, indeed,  did  not 
at  present  affect  the  classics,  nor  yet,  save  in  a  modified 
degree,  the  English  authors  themselves.  Bui  what  of 
that? — one  man's  meat  was  another  man's  poison;  there 
were  other  lads  to  whom  he  could  lay  open  his  library,  and 
to  whom  Caleb  would  never  grudge  the  beauty  and  the 
wealth  of  his  father's  grand  old  books. 


94  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

As  to  the  pictures,  there  were  brethren  who  remonstra- 
ted with  Squire  Gage  for  keeping  them  in  their  bare  can- 
vas, in  the  manner  in  which  they  had  hung  since  his  dame 
freed  them  from  their  frames,  which  she  had  dispatched, 
along  with  what  plate,  tapestry,  ebony,  ivory,  silk  and  fine 
linen  there  had  been  at  the  Mall,  to  be  disposed  of  in  Lon- 
don, to  help  the  funds  for  the  systematic  relief  of  one  small 
fraction  of  the  poor  and  needy.  These  strict  brethren 
were  apprehensive  lest  the  poor  painted  faces,  love-locks, 
top-knots,  sword-hilts  and  citherns  should  serve  to  produce 
pride  of  birth  and  race  in  their  possessor.  But  though  the 
squire  protested  gravely  that  he  did  not  think  it  was  ask- 
ed of  him,  or  of  any  man,  to  sit  in  judgment  on  the  sins  of 
his  forefathers,  and  "  improve"  them,  he  was  of  opinion 
that  there  was  as  much  humility  as  pride  to  be  got  from 
the  honest  study  of  those  lingering  shadows  on  the  wall. 
And  the  squire,  as  he  spoke,  glanced  at  a  truculent  old 
Gage  who  had  done  great  execution  in  the  Civil  Wars, 
and  a  vain,  light  woman  who  had  wedded  and  abandoned 
him. 

"  But  tell  me,  my  Monsieur,"  asked  Grand'mere,  thought- 
fully, as  she  inspected  his  labors,  "  will  this  gracious  house 
last  ?  Is  it  that  you  have  founded  it  in  perpetuity,  or  that 
the  benevolent  will  keep  it  up  by  a  succession  of  donations 
and  dedications,  as  in  the  French  houses  of  charity  and 
mercy  ?  Pardon  me,  Monsieur,  that  I  am  a  Lot's  wife  of 
doubt  and  distrust,  and  fear  that  the  Mall  house  may  be 
abused  like  other  houses  in  other  hands,  and  in  other  gen- 
erations. How  will  you  guard  and  fence  it  when  even  the 
brave  young  Monsieur  is  done  with  carrying  out  his  fa- 
ther's intentions  ?" 

Squire  Gage  smiled  gently,  and  shook  his  head.  "  It  is 
one  good  of  imperfection,  madam,  that  it  wants  not  fencing 
and  guarding.  And  that  this  poor  scheme  of  mine  is  im- 
perfect, I  and  my  dame  knew  from  the  beginning.  But 
what  would  you  have  ?  There  was  a  crying  need  for  some 
refornfation,  some  commencement  of  a  good  work.  We 
made  our  trial,  and  did  our  best — for  our  day.  My  dear 
madam,  a  future  day  is  not  mine,  and  I  am  not  called  upon 
to  provide  for  it,  or  meddle  with  it.  No,  I  shall  not  be- 
queath the  rents  which  may  yet  come  in  to  me  to  Gage's 
Hospital.     Why  should  I?     God  has  raised  a  natural  bar- 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  95 

rier.  My  lad  is  as  much  a  messenger  from  Him,  and  the 
messenger  who  comes  first  and  nearest  to  me,  as  my  poor- 
est fellow-creature." 

"And  Monsieur  Caleb,  will  he  not  wash  the  disciples' 
feet  also  ?" 

"  Not  in  his  father's  and  mother's  way.  Why  should 
he  ?  There  is  no  call  upon  him  to  walk  in  their  footsteps. 
He  may  go  his  own  way.  Any  other  conclusion  savoreth 
of  an  automaton  and  a  martinet,  since  my  son  is  not  of  the 
stuff  which  hypocrites  are  made  of.  No,  he  may  go  his 
own  way,  so  that  he  follow  in  Another's  footsteps ;  and 
how  far  and  wide  they  diverge,  on  how  many  soils,  by  how 
many  paths,  blessed  be  God,  do  these  divinely  human  foot- 
steps travel !  I  go  thus  far,  that  I  have  not,  in  my  opin- 
ion, made  Caleb  a  poorer  man  in  the  long  run,  because  I 
have  spent  the  savings  of  my  minority,  besides  some  fur- 
nishings and  personal  belongings,  and  sold  a  farm  or  two, 
which  might  have  fallen  to  him.  He  will  have  enough  for 
a  gentleman  farmer.  He  may  take  in  land,  rear  stock, 
buy  and  sell,  build  up  the  house  anew,  extend  its  borders, 
for  he  is  shrewd  and  prudent,  and  skillful  in  business,  as 
well  as  generous  and  modest.  He  may  break  up  the 
Waaste,  drain  the  Mall  Deep,  cut  down  the  old  coppice, 
erect  wool-mills  and  corn-mills  just  as.  the  first  Gage  of 
the  Mall  drew  the  first  furrow  between  this  and  Sedge 
Pond.  It  is  in  the  kind,  and  in  the  sample,  and  thence  we 
have  been  distinguished  as  namesakes  of  the  son  of  Jephun- 
neh,  who  had  the  hill-country  of  Hebron  for  his  portion, 
and  the  expulsion  of  the  sons  of  Anak  for  his  reward. 
Nay,  but  forgive  this  foolish  boasting ;  it  is  an  old  man's 
garrulity.  Caleb  will  not  continue  the  establishment ;  but 
I  have  confidence  in  my  son  that  he  will  let  it  go  down 
slowly  and  gently,  and  that  he  will  not  be  minded  to  turn 
the  last  of  its  inmates  adrift ;  not  though  he  wen'  the  most 
troublesome  and  ingrained  black  sheep.  He  will  honor 
the  Methodist  body  that  far,  and  none  the  less  esteem  it 
that  he  hath  never  belonged  to  it ;  and  he  will  not  be  in 
any  haste  to  remove  his  father  and  mother's  landmarks." 

"It  is  true,  my  friend,"  replied  Grand'mere,  "that  there 
are  Christians,  and  Christians;  and  I  confess  it  does  seem 
tome  that  the  early  Christians  selling  their  land,  laying 
the  money  at  the  Apostles'  feet,  and  having  all  their  goods 


96  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

in  common,  reads  like  practices  designed  for  the  exigen- 
cies of  their  country  and  age,  not  as  a  pattern  for  all 
time." 

"  Without  doubt,  my  dear  madam ;  and  young  eyes  see 
flaws  in  goodly  robes  which  their  predecessors  wore  with 
exultation  and  thankfulness.  Why  not  ?  What  were  the 
clearness  and  sunshine  of  the  present  given  them  for,  if  not 
to  correct  what  is  cumbrous  and  obsolete,  unfit  and  mis- 
shapen in  the  cloak  or  gown,  though  it  served  its  turn 
in  days  gone  by,  when  no  fault  was  seen  in  it  and  it 
sheltered  its  wearer  from  the  mists  and  storms  of  the  win- 
ter of  the  past.  I  have  always  thought  it  one  of  the  in- 
consistencies and  eccentricities  of  your  Michel  de  Mon- 
taigne that  he  would  20  abroad  in  his  father's  old  cloak 
because  it  was  his  father's.  Caleb  doth  not  choose  to  vex 
me,  but  I  know  he  thinks  my  large  family  can  not  last  long 
(inasmuch  as  it  is  an  arbitrary  institution,  and  not  God's 
ordinance  of  blood  and  kindred),  when  there  is  no  supreme 
necessity  for  it,  without  breeding  and  fostering  jealousies, 
strife,  and  violence,  as  in  the  religious  houses  of  all  sects, 
after  a  lapse  of  time.  The  boy  hath  had  before  now  to 
help  me  to  put  down  differences  and  divisions,  even  be- 
tween preachers  and  teachers,  with  a  high  hand,  and  once 
we  had  to  call  in  the  civil  power  against  a  poor  rogue  of 
a  tinker  who  had  reminded  me  of  a  certain  illustrious 
dreamer,  but  who  was  unlike  John  Bunyan  in  this  respect, 
that  he  was  so  left  to  himself  as  to  take  all  he  could  get 
and  give  the  worst  word  on  his  entertainment,  annoy  and 
insult  his  fellow-lodgers,  and  drive  them  from  receivinc: 

CD  t  O 

profit  from  the  exercises.  At  last  he  sunk  to  the  low  pitch 
of  lusting  after  the  very  homely  trenchers  and  porringers 
out  of  which  he  had  eaten  his  meals,  and  of  secreting  them 
with  the  purpose  of  removing  them,  My  good  dame,  he 
struck  and  kicked  the  man  who  detected  him  in  his  ini- 
quity so  forcibly,  that  murder  might  have  been  done  had 
not  Caleb,  in  his  young  strength  and  natural  lira  very,  gone 
between  and  sundered  the  combatants.  Yet,  if  you  will 
believe  it,  that  poor  sinner  wepl  abundantly  when  he  made 
full  confession  to  me  in  Keedham  Jail,  and  declared,  what 
I  have  no  reason  to  discredit,  that  he  was  never  so  near 
grace  as  in  his  earlier  sojourn  at  the  Mall.  Therefore,  why 
Bhould  not  grace  surprise  some  oilier  wretched  wayfarer 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  97 

any  day  before  I  draw  my  last  breath  at  the  Mall — come 
upon  him  like  a  strong  man,  take  from  him  his  goods  and 
deprive  him  of  his  armor  wherein  he  trusted,  and  leave  him 
not  with  the  dismal  wail  '  almost,'  but  the  jubilant  shout, 
'  altogether  a  Christian  ?'  " 

"  Monsieur,"  cried  Grand'mere,  impulsively,  as  she  raised 
her  grey  eyes  to  his  violet  eyes,  "  I  am  older  than  you, 
but  I  am  a  weak,  foolish  woman  ;  grant  me  a  favor — give 
me  your  blessing." 

"  All  the  blessings  of  the  heaven  above  and  the  earth 
beneath!"  responded  Squire  Gage,  fervently;  "though 
they  are  called  down  by  an  unworthy  brother  on  a  true 
sister.  Rather,  I  should  beg  a  Huguenot's  prayers  for  me 
and  mine,  and  for  my  work,  which  is  nearly  ended.  Shall 
we  pray  together,  madam?" 

_  In  this  manner  two  Christian  enthusiasts  pondered  on 
Christian  ethics,  compared  notes  on  good  Avorks,  and 
thought  no  shame  of  reverently  approaching  their  Father 
in  heaven. 

The  squire  was  solicitous,  with  a  country  gentleman's 
imperative  hospitality,  to  entertain  Grand'mere  as  became 
both  her  and  him.  With  a  delicate  tenderness  of  respect 
he  had  even  striven  to  recall  old  memories,  and  to  send  his 
usual  habits  to  the  wall  for  the  occasion,  so  that  the  meal 
served  at  one  end  of  the  kitchen,  with  its  fruit,  white  wine, 
and  the  nosegay  of  all  the  autumn  flowers  then  blowing  in 
Dame  Lucy's  disenfranchised  parterres,  should  be  as  like 
as  possible  to  the  French  feast  which  he  had  once  seen 
served  up,  in  an  English  parsonage,  by  the  quick  instincts 
of  a  soul  as  generous  as  his  own. 

Grand'mere  received  every  gracious  attention  with  a 
gratitude  and  a  gratification  still  nunc  gracious. 

"Monsieur,"  she  exclaimed,  in  her  lively,  metaphorical 
way,  looking  round  on  the  tankards,  the  books,  the  pict- 
ures, and  the  banquet,  with  eyes  which  would  aever  grow 
too  dim  to  sparkle,  "  iffis  as  if  you  had  got  cray-fish  from 
Montfaucon,  wild  boars  from  Ardennes, fierce  bears  from 
the  Pyrenees.  It  is  as  if  you  had  received  an  intimation 
that  the  three  Magi  were  coming  to  \i-it  yon,  and  hail 
made  your  preparations  accordingly." 

The  young  squire  was  from  home,  which  was  only  a  par- 
tial disappointment    to  G  rand' me  re,  since   it    was  one  pari 

E 


98  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

of  her  intention  to  make  the  most  searching,  interested  in- 
quiries, which  her  perfect  politeness  would  permit,  respect- 
ing the  disposition  and  inclination  of  Monsieur  Caleb. 

In  truth,  very  little  importunity  was  needed  in  order  to 
obtain  the  desired  information,  for  here  "  the  old  man  elo- 
quent" was  full  of  very  pardonable  fatherly  garrulity. 
His  son  Caleb  was  his  first  and  last  born — his  only  child, 
the  son  of  Rachel,  the  prop  of  his  old  age,  the  desire  of  his 
fading  eyes.  He  christened  him  without  fear  as  the  gift 
of  God,  and  beheld  in  their  relationship,  not  only  the  op- 
portunity for  the  lawful  indulgence  of  his  natural  affections, 
but  the  type  of  all  that  is  tender  and  true,  loyal  and  sa- 
cred, binding  the  creature  to  the  Creator,  the  manifold 
children  to  the  universal  Father. 

It  sounded  as  if  the  father  and  the  son  were  not  only 
filial,  but  fraternal  in  their  regard,  as  if  they  were  a  pair 
of  close  friends,  such  as  two  good  men  living  alone  togeth- 
er in  a  circle  of  dependents  might  well  become.  Yet  this 
freedom  and  familiarity  disturbed  Grand'mere's  calcula- 
tions a  little.  Squire  Gage  not  only  expatiated  contented- 
ly on  the  assistance  which  his  son  rendered  him,  and  the 
confidence  which  he  rejsosed  in  him;  but  he  recounted 
gleefully  the  vigorous,  stubborn  mental  encounters  the 
two  had  on  the  subjects  wherein  they  differed ;  the  lessons 
they  gave  each  other  in  opposite  sciences,  and  the  news 
with  which  they  twitted  each  other  on  their  fin  lures. 
Grand'mere  was  actually  tempted  to  hold  up  her  hands 
and  cry  halt.  She  could  hardly  fathom  such  a  relation- 
ship ;  she  had  been  accustomed  to  playful  as  well  as  ten- 
der friendship  between  mother  and  son,  but  between  father 
and  son,  even  where  there  was  devoted  affection,  she  had 
witnessed  no  such  liberty.  It  required  Grand'mere's  for- 
bearance and  her  liking  lor  the  family  at  the  Mall  to  look 
over  this  dangerous  license,  and  make  her  attribute  it  to 
English  air  and  English  institutions  alone. 

Having  subdued  this  single  scrupre,  Grand'mere  came  at 
last  to  the  object,  of  her  mission,  not  without  finesse  and 
circumlocution;  because, though  her  character  was  in  es- 
sent  ials  clear  as  crystal,  it  included  in  its  elements  delicate 
French  tact,  and  ingenuity.  The  substance  of  the  errand 
was  quite  simple:  Grand'mere  had  a  graBd-daughter, 
Squire  Gage  had  a  son,  and  the  promising  young  man  and 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  99 

young  woman,  both  moderately  endowed  with  the  goods 
of  fortune,  were  contemporaries  and  neighbors  :  was  there 
no  significance,  no  suitability  in  these  things?  Grand'- 
mere made  a  proposal  of  a  treaty  of  marriage  between  the 
Squire's  son  and  her  grand-daughter,  Yolande  Dupuy. 
She  had  no  notion  that  she  was  doing  any  thing  but  con- 
ferring the  highest  honor  by  the  overture,  while  it  was  a 
matter  of  course  that  it  should  come  from  her.  She  Mas 
fully  persuaded  that  the  squire  and  she  were  the  persons 
strictly  entitled  to  settle  the  preliminaries  of  any  matri- 
monial alliance  entered  into  by  their  children,  and  that  no 
one,  not  even  the  principals,  could  be  more  deeply  inter- 
ested or  more  sensible  of  the  importance  of  the  step  sug- 
gested. Grand'mere,  therefore,  spoke  with  quiet  dignity 
and  with  a  due  consciousness  of  her  authority  in  the  mat- 
ter. 

The  squire  was  somewhat  taken  aback  as  Grand'mere, 
in  fairness  to  her  grandchild,  fluently,  but  without  exag- 
geration, summed  up  briefly  the  advantages  of  the  match, 
dwelling  on  Yolande's  good  qualities,  her  virtue  and  wis- 
dom, her  truth  to  her  parents,  and  her  sweetness  to  her 
Grand'mere.  The  comparatively  innocent  seclusion  in 
which  she  had  grown  up,  the  fitting  instruction  she  had 
received,  the  personal  attractions  (though  these  were  but 
a  bagatelle)  that  she  possessed,  and  the  modest  but  respect- 
able dowry  which  her  father  was  able  and  willing  to  give 
her,  all  these  were  faithfully  touched  on.  Then  Grand'- 
mere went  nimbly  over  to  the  other  side  of  the  question, 
and  dwelt  nobly,  liberally,  and  at  far  greater  length,  on  the 
merits  of  the  young  squire,  in  his  reputation,  his  family, 
his  menage.  Yolande's  father  and  mother  would  do  their 
utmost  to  meet  the  young  man's  gifts  with  their  Yolande's 
goodness.  They  wished  to  marry  their  daughter  while 
they  could  still  choose  for  her  in  marriage,  and  give  her 
hand  where  there  was  least,  risk  of  a  fatal  error.  And 
Squire  Gage,  who  was  a  father,  would  not  blame  them  or 
scorn  them  because  they  were  foreigners  and  French. 

The  squire  was  not  altogether  so  confounded  as  a  mod- 
ern, learned,  and  devout  squire — did  such  exist — mighl 
be  nowadays.  Marriages  continued  frequently  to  be 
family  alliances  in  houses  far  below  the  rank  of  those  of 
dukes  and  earls.     Squire  Gage's  father  had  found  his  wit e 


100  THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY. 

selected,  sought  out,  and  all  but  married  to  him  by  an 
obliging  and  active-minded  kinswoman,  and  the  squire 
had  never  had  any  reason  to  regret  his  father  and  mother 
as  other  than  a  well-matched,  well-satisfied  couple.  The 
early  Methodists  were  accustomed  to  view  wedlock  with  a 
strong  reference  to  the  interests  of  the  society.  In  this 
light  influential  members,  without  hesitation  or  fear,  ar- 
ranged and  carried  through  marriages  for  the  good  of  the 
meeting-house  or  chapel  first,  the  individuals'  claims  and 
characters  being  glanced  at  afterward.  Some  of  the  ob- 
scurer conferences  might  even  occasionally  decide  them 
by  lot,  like  the  Moravians.  Squire  Gage  remembered  that 
it  had  been  an  obstacle  to  his  own  union,  and  regarded  as 
a  serious  difficulty  and  danger,  that  it  had  taken  its  rise 
in  the  motions  of  carnal  affection  and  the  promptings  of 
the  natural  man,  and  not  in  a  single  eye  to  the  evangel- 
ization of  the  world,  and  a  profound  respect  for  the  exten- 
sion of  Christianity. 

So  Squire  Gage  was  not  inclined  to  silence  or  scout 
Grand'mere's  mission,  even  if  his  goodness  had  suffered  him 
to  be  hasty  in  condemning  and  deriding  what  had  been 
undertaken  m  good  faith  and  sober  earnestness.  He  con- 
sented to  take  the  proposal  into  mature  consideration 
without  a  thought  of  doing  any  wrong  to  his  friend  and 
son.  He  freely  admitted  that  he  would  rejoice  to  have  a 
young  gentlewoman  at  the  Mall  again,  particularly  if  she 
were  of  Grand'mere's  race  and  rearing.  He  was  not  such 
a  miserable  bigot,  either  to  his  nation  or  to  his  Method- 
ism, as  to  undervalue  the  whole  French  people  and  the 
noble  band  of  Huguenot  exiles.  He  confessed  there  was 
some  call  for  another  mistress  at  the  Mall,  though  the 
mention  of  it  brought  the  rheum  to  the  eyes  which  had 
seen  its  last  mistress.  But  Madam  could  comprehend  and 
make  allowance  for  that.  One  who  would  deal  kindly 
with  his  infirmities,  and  would  manage  the  women,  among 
whom  he  and  Caleb  could  not  enter  and  hector  to  the  ex- 
lent  of  lending  a  rough  lick  to  an  incorrigible  malcontent, 
would  be  a  great  blessing  to  them.  The  greatest  scolds 
among  the  women,  poor  creatures,  were  always  mild  ncga- 
1i'>ns  to  him,  but  there  was  more  than  a  suspicion  that 
they  were  apt  to  employ  their  leisure  in  idle  bickerings 
and  petty  feuds,  which  though  not  serious,  were  not  seem- 


TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  101 

ly  or  comfortable  to  their  faith.  They  would  mind  a  mis- 
tress, especially  if  she  were  like  his  old  dame,  a  dove 
among  barn-door  fowls.  Certainly,  for  that  and  for  other 
reasons  Squire  Gage  would  gladly  hail  his  son's  early  en- 
trance into  marriage,  which  was  honorable  in  all  men; 
but  his  healthy  instinct  impelled  him  to  add,  gently,  in 
the  end, "  Nevertheless,  my  good  madam,  doth  it  not  strike 
you  that  our  theme  savoreth  alarmingly  of  a  manage  de 
convenance  fn 

"  Of  what  else,  Monsieur  ?  and  of  what  can  you  make 
a  better  market  than  of  the  noblest  sort  of  convenance — fit- 
ness, obedience  to  parents,  dutifulness — not  of  fancy  and 
passion  ?"  demanded  Grand'mere,  warmly.  "Ah!  trust 
me,  my  Monsieur,  when  the  good  choice  has  been  made 
with  prayer  and  blessing  by  the  careful  parents,  sacred, 
chaste,  sweet  wedded  love  (all  the  purer  and  higher  that 
it  is  born  of  duty,  and  not  of  desire)  will  follow  without  fail 
in  those  good  and  honest  hearts  on  which,  and  not  on  their 
memories  alone,  is  written  the  substance  of  their  catechism, 
'  Quelle  est  la  principale  fin  cle  la  vief  and  '  Quel  est  le  souv- 
erain  Men  des  hommesf  Fie !  Monsieur,  would  you  rath- 
er have  the  boys  and  the  girls  madly  pursuing,  and  setting 
their  weak  seals  blemished  to  their  idle,  wandering  imagi- 
nations ?"  exclaimed  Grand'mere,  in  such  unfeigned  horror, 
that  under  her  empressement  Squire  Gage  felt  all  but  con- 
victed of  impropriety  and  indiscretion.  "  You  are  English 
— and  the  English,  the  best  of  them,  love  their  own  wills 
in  the  affections,"  continued  Grand'mere, more  temperate- 
ly ;  "but  when  every  great  point  is  gained,  is  it  that  you 
would  cast  fancy  and  passion  into  the  opposite panier,  and 
suffer  it  to  weigh  down  the  ass,  Monsieur  ?  The  marriages 
of  Isaac  and  Rebekah,  of  Boaz  and  Ruth — say  what  were 
they  but  the  noblest  sort  of  manages  de  convenanci  /" 

Squire  Gage  had  been  slipping  his  fingers  into  his  great 
family  Bible  to  find  the  entry  of  his  son's  birth  and  l>a|>- 
tism  in  order  to  show  it  to  Grand'mere,  in  return  for  the 
sight  of  the  certificate  of  the  Protestant  baptism  ofYo- 
lande  Dupuy,  with  which  he  had  been  favored.  As  he 
did  so  he  was  tempted  to  have  recourse  to  a  practice  in 
favor  with  the  old  Methodists — even  with  Mr.  John  him- 
self—which was  not  engaged  in  lightly,  far  less  irreverent- 
ly, but  which  nevertheless  had  a  strange  resemblance  to 


102  THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

the  heathen  art  of  divination,  christened  by  a  Christian 
name. 

"  What  think  you  of  the  Sortes  Biblicce,  madam  ?  Shall 
we  try  a  verse  of  Holy  Scripture,  to  ascertain  what  we  are 
patting  our  hands  to  ?" 

Grand'mere  acquiesced  readily.  She  was  not  farther 
before  her  age  than  good  Squire  Gage,  and  she  4iad  her 
superstitions  as  well  as  her  French  prejudices.  She  clasp- 
ed her  hands  and  leaned  forward  breathlessly,  while  the 
squire  put  his  hand  darkly  into  the  closed  Book  on  an  un- 
seen verse,  and  opening  it  read  aloud — 

"  My  son,  despise  not  the  chastening  of  the  Lord,  neither 
be  weary  of  his  correction." 

"  "Well,  that  is  plain  sailing,"  declared  Squire  Gage,  sub- 
missively, and  even  cheerfully,  seeing  Grand'mere's  ex- 
pressive face  fall  at  the  indication.  "  Whatever  may  come 
of  our  communing — and  take  note  this  admonition  doth 
not  iinpugn  its  good  ending — patience  is  a  virtue  like  to  be 
in  request  for  all  concerned.  I  confess  I  have  always  been 
over-fain  to  seek  relief  from  present  evils.  If  you  please,, 
we  will  take  the  matter  quietly,  dear  dame,  and  permit 
the  young  people's  hearts  to  speak,  though  it  were  but 
one  word.     I  do  not  fear  that  they  will  speak  forwardly. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

TnE  SECRET  OF  THE  RLDE  TO  THE  MALL — A  WOMAN  DESPISED 

IN  HER  YOUTH. 

Grand'mere  returned  in  good  heart  to  the  Shottery  Cot- 
tage. Her  ride  to  the  Mall  had  only  been  the  commence- 
ment of  the  preliminaries.  She  had  never  dreamed  of  set- 
tling the  affair  in  a  single  interview;  that  would  not  have 
been  according  to  her  notions  of  discretion.  She  was 
pleased  with  all  she  had  seen  at  the  Mall;  with  the  devo- 
tion and  charity  on  a  Luge  scale  her  heart  was  full.  But 
though  Grand'mere  talked  to  Yolande  by  the  hour  on  the 
veritable  hospice  she  had  visited,  ami  on  the  beauty  of 
character  she  saw  in  its  founders,  not  a  word  did  she  say 
which  could  make  the  girl  cast  down  her  shy  eyes  in  per- 
plexity and  confusion.     Grand'mere  could,  without  com- 


TIIE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  103 

punction,  institute  a  treaty  of  marriage  for  her  grand- 
daughter, but  she  would  have  thought  herself  the  most 
indelicate  of  women  had  she  breathed  a  syllable  to  the 
girl,  who  had  her  suspicions;  and  this  notwithstanding 
that  they  were  incessantly  together,  and  full  of  fond  con- 
fidences. 

Unfortunately  she  was  not  so  reticent  elsewhere.  With- 
out a  thought  of  any  unwomanliness  in  her  act,  Grand' - 
mere  considered  it  but  neighborly  to  whisper  it  to  Madam 
Rolle  of  the  rectory.  With  all  her  hopes  and  cares  for 
her  daughters,  Madam  Rolle  had  never  imagined  any  thing 
so  barefaced  as  this  flagrant  instance  of  French  fashions 
and  French  morals,  and  was  almost  staggered  in  her  esteem 
for  the  old  Grand'mere  who  had  tried  to  break  the  storm 
of  her  own  calamity  to  her.  As  Madam  Rolle  kept  noth- 
ing from  the  rector,  she  immediately  imparted  to  him  this 
startling  bit  of  news  ;  and  in  return  he  asked  her  to  what 
young  men  he  should  propose  Dolly  and  Milly?  They 
must  not,  however,  be  ranters  and  Jacobins,  who  con- 
sorted with  blaspheming,  foul-mouthed,  filthy  shoe-makers 
and  weavers,  compared%ith  whom  honest  chimney-sweeps 
were  finished  gentlemen;  for  he  had  made  up  his  mind 
never  to  ask  a  favor  from  these,  not  even  to  rid  him  of  his 
daughters. 

Madam  Rolle,  like  many  another  madam,  was  at  a  loss 
what  to  make  of  her  husband's  irony,  and  look  refuge  in 
the  sympathy  and  indignation  of  her  daughters.  She  set 
them  up  against  their  young  French  friend,  who  was 
taking  such  Impudent  means  to  get  the  better  of  them,  and 
seltlelierself,  before  either  of  them  was  suited  with  a  hus- 
band and  an  establishment. 

Yolande,  poor  girl,  could  not  understand  why  all  of  a 
sudden  the  rectory  girls  began,  in  French  parlance,  "to 
lift  their  noses  at  her,"  to  speak  at  her,  to  twit  her  with 
what  she  could  not  help,  and  to  which  she  was  not  as  vet 
formally  privy.  In  the  end  there  wasgreal  mischief  done ; 
so  bad,  that  it  was  all  lmt  irremediable. 

Young  Caleb  Gage  had  little  or  no  intercourse  with  the 
Rolles.  The  greatest  hardship  and  danger  of  his  position 
was,  that  it  wholly  isolated  him  from  those  of  his  fellows 
and  eimals  who  were  not  of  his  father's  way  of  thinking, 
li   mattered  little  that  Caleb  the  younger  differed  in  bis 


104  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

conclusions  from  Caleb  the  elder.  Unless  the  young  squire 
had  been  prepared  to  place  himself  in  utter  antagonism 
to  the  old  father  whom  he  venerated  so  deeply  and  loved, 
so  dearly,  his  own  moderation  and  his  reaction  in  favor 
of  general  Church  standards  would  have  profited  him 
nothing. 

Men  and  women  of  the  present  day  know  little  of  Meth- 
odism, if  they  do  not  understand  that  it  was  the  burden 
of  a  world  lying  in  the  grossest  wickedness,  riot,  and  wan- 
tonness, which  drove  into  vehement  protest  so  many  good 
and  honest  hearts — drove  them  into  the  extravagances  of 
enthusiasm  and  the  excesses  of  zeal,  if,  indeed,  they  were 
extravagances  and  excesses.  For,  to  judge  correctly  of 
such  so-called  extravagances  and  excesses,  it  is  necessary 
to  contrast  a  house  like  the  Mall — its  voluntary  relinquish- 
ment of  the  state  and  attributes  of  gentle  station — with 
houses  where  notorious  wickedness  was  daily  committed, 
where  the  same  card-party  sat,  ate,  slept,  and  woke  again, 
while  they  gambled  away  their  fathers1  lands,  their  chil- 
dren's bread,  and  even  their  wretched  wives,  for  twenty 
or  thirty  hours  at  a  stretch.  In  those  days  women  died 
prematurely,  in  agonizing  pangs,  from  the  poison  of  white 
paint ;  while  men  were  found  guilty  of  forgery  and  high- 
way robbery,  and  spirits  went  into  the  outer  darkness  for 
a  set  of  French  tapestry,  or  Indian  paper-hangings,  a  china 
baby,  or  a  piece  of  velvet  of  a  rarely  pretty  device.  If 
Wfi  faithfully  compare  the  free  reception  and  wholesale 
housing  of  the  indigent  and  outcast  at  the  Mall  with  the 
bitter  penury  and  terrible  struggles  of  men  and  women 
ruined  by  the  infamous  bubble  schemes  of  the  era,  or  by 
wildly  striving  to  raise  themselves  out  of  their  low  estate 
of  barbarous  ignorance  and  base  depravity,  then  we  will, 
perhaps,  forma  fair  estimate  of  the  influence  of  Methodism, 
not  only  on  the  corrupt  refinement  of  men  of  the  world, 
but  on  the  densely  stupid,  fatuous,  sensual  animalism  of 
the  poor  colliers  and  pottery-men,  down  whose  grimy  faces 
the  tears  of  penitence,  purer  than  dew -drops  and  brighter 
than  diamonds,  "  washed  the  white  channels"  of  a  new  and 
better  nature  at  the  pleadings,  and  strivings,  and  wrest- 
lings in  prayer  of  Whitfield  and  his  brethren.  Do  not 
shrink  from  thinking  of  that  dissolute  world,  I  beseech  you, 
if  you  would  be  simply  just  to  the  Methodists,  and  neither 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  105 

exaggerate  their  Christianity  and  their  heroism,  nor  ex- 
tenuate their  mysticism  and  their  lapses  from  the  ortho- 
doxy of  this  or  that  great  creed.  After  all,  one  may  be 
permitted  to  doubt  whether  the  decided  position  which 
the  early  Methodist  leaders  took  up,  and  the  passionate 
nature  of  their  testimony,  were  exaggerated  and  excessive, 
in  view  of  the  crying  evils  and  the  barren  latitudinarian- 
ism  with  which  they  waged  war. 

These  sentences  are  written  in  the  old  sense  of  apology 
for  what  needs  no  apology  in  the  modern  meaning  of  the 
word,  and  in  feeble  illustration  of  the  causes  of  the  pecul- 
iarities of  Methodism.  Little  do  modern  men  and  women, 
for  the  most  part,  know  of  the  brand  which  the  early  Meth- 
odists bore,  when  their  strenuous  efforts  at  reform  were 
looked  upon  as  the  most  uncalled-for  and  insupportable 
acts  of  aggression;  when  they  were  shunned  as  men 
stricken  with  the  pest  would  have  been  ;  when  they  were 
accused  of  the  most  incredible  fanaticism  and  socialism, 
and  bemoaned  by  their  friends  and  neighbors  as  being 
more  left  to  themselves  than  drunkards,  gamesters,  or 
common  thieves.  Save  the  early  Christians,  no  religious 
sect — not  even  the  Reformers,  whether  Lollard  or  Luther- 
an— excited  such  a  storm  of  hostility,  or  were  so  univers- 
ally despised,  detested,  and  reviled  as  were  the  followers 
of  Wesley. 

The  young  squire  of  the  Mall  was  so  neglected  and 
foresworn  by  his  brother  squires  and  the  families  of  the 
better  classes  in  the  neighborhood,  that  had  it  not  been 
for  his  healthy,  independent  nature,  and  his  great  friend- 
ship for  his  father,  he  might  have  been  driven  into  the  low 
company  to  which  Methodism  was  then  generally  belie\  ed 
to  incline. 

Old  Squire  Gage  had  been  fortified  against  the  deleteri- 
ous and  destructive  consequences  of  such  an  atmosphere 
by  such  airs  from  heaven  as  visit  few  men'-  souls.  L  is 
not  asserted  here,  however,  that  it  had  not  injured  him, 
developed  oddities  in  him,  sapped  ever  so  little  his  sim- 
plicity and  energy,  and  made  him,  notwithstanding  all  bis 
benevolent  projects,  more  of  an  abstract  thinker  and 
dreamer  than  a  practical  man. 

But  young  Caleb  Gage  could  hardly  expect  the  Bame 
immunity:  and  it  was  well  for  ldm  that  he  was  not  equally 

E  2 


106  TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

tried.  In  the  public  places  which  his  principles  did  not 
forbid  him  to  frequent,  and  in  one  or  two  neighboring 
houses  which,  for  ancient  alliances'  sake,  still  offered  an 
open  door  to  a  Gage  of  the  Mall,  Caleb  had  some  inter- 
course with  his  class,  and  was  not  so  entirely  proscribed, 
denounced,  and  doomed  to  live  down  his  differences  of 
creed  and  life  as  his  father  had  been. 

Thus  it  chanced  that,  happening  to  attend  the  yearly 
fair  at  Reedham,  Caleb  Gage  supped  and  stayed  for  the 
night  at  the  house  of  a  tolerant  Keedham  physician,  who 
had  been  his  father's  worthy  doctor  for  the  last  half  cen- 
tury. Doctor  Humphrey  was  no  Methodist  himself, 
though  he  had  accorded  his  evidence : 

"  Ilike  to  attend  your  patients  at  the  Mall,  squire  ;  for 
the  most  part  they're  patient  as  well  as  patients ;  and  I'd 
liever  wait  on  their  death-beds  than  those  of  most  others, 
for,  however  sorrily  they  live,  they  make  up  for  it  by  dying 
well,  they  do — yes,  your  Methodists  die  well." 

At  Dr.  Humphrey's,  on  this  occasion,  Caleb  met,  among 
other  young  people,  Mr.  Philip  Rolle's  daughters ;  and  in 
the  intervals  between  the  games  and  the  songs  he  had  to 
submit  to  be  stared  at  and  tittered  over,  and  viewed  as  a 
curiosity  ahnost  as  great  as  the  wild  beasts  they  had  visited 
at  the  shows  hi  the  afternoon.  Mr.  Caleb  Gage  had  him- 
self visited  the  wild  beasts,  and  he  had  also  gone  and  list- 
ened for  a  time  to  the  Methodist  preacher,  whose  stage  was 
competing  with  the  dancing  booths,  and  had  joined  heartily 
in  the  hymn-singing  ;  and  when  there  had  been  a  threaten- 
ing demonstration  in  the  crowd  in  that  quarter,  he  had 
sprung  up  on  the  stage,  and  prepared  to  use  his  personal 
influence  to  ward  off  violence,  and  take  his  chance  with 
the  preacher  and  his  friends. 

Caleb  was  not  without  something  of  what  Grand'mere 
would  have  called  la  beaute  du  diable — the  morbid  attrac- 
tion of  forbidden  fruit  to  his  detractors  and  assailants ; 
and  he  had  himself  a  half-amused  perception  of  the  fact, 
while  lie  had  no  great  inclination  to  return  the  convpliment. 
The  Methodist  home  was  a  different  school  of  manners,  to 
say  the  least  of  it;  and  these  vaporing,  swaggering  young 
men,  and  swimming,  bridling  young  women,  appeared 
ruder-tempered  and  emptier-headed  to  Caleb  than  they 
would  have  appeared  to  his  father,  because  Caleb  as  yet 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  107 

judged  largely  by  the  surface  ;  while  the  old  squire  had  a 
poet's  and  a  prophet's  plumb-line  to  fathom  many  feet 
deeper  into  human  nature. 

There  was  one  gibe  constantly  recurring  on  the  least 
provocation  in  sentiment,  or  forfeit,  or  game  of  the  Trav- 
eler, and  this  was  Caleb's  supposed  attachment  to  French 
fashions.  The  gibe  was  followed  by  taunting  assertions 
that  somebody's  troth  might  have  been  sold  in  his  cradle, 
and  that  he  might  have  exchanged  the  pap-boat  for  the 
wedding-ring,  so  tame-spirited  was  he. 

"  My  head  is  somewhat  thick,"  admitted  Caleb  Gage  to 
Dolly  Rolle,  at  a  crisis  of  the  by-play.  "  I  must  confess 
that  you  distance  me  in  your  merriment.  I  can  not  think 
what  you  are  all  driving  at.  When  did  I  discover  a  pal- 
ate for  foreign  kickshaws  ?  (It  is  as  clear  as  the  sun  that 
it  is  me  you  mean,  so  none  need  go  to  deny  it.)  As  far 
as  I  can  tell,  my  tastes  are  all  English ;  for  that  matter,  I 
have  no  chance  of  gratifying  them  otherwise,  since  I  have 
not  so  much  as  the  entrance  to  any  strange  circle,  unless  it 
be  that  of  the  French  Huguenot  family  at  the  Shottery  Cot- 
tage in  Sedge  Pond,  which  my  father  esteems  so  highly." 

Caleb  did  not  observe,  or  else  he  paid  no  heed  to  Dolly's 
smiles,  nods,  and  winks  at  his  unlucky  allusion. 

"  As  to  marriage,"  Caleb  went  on  stoutly,  "  I  presume 
I  should  have  some  inkling,  if  I  were  ever  so  little  started 
on  the  road  to  the  church  on  that  solemn  business  ;  where- 
as, mistress,  I  have  as  little  thought  of  marrying  till  I  cut 
my  wisdom-teeth  as  the  black  fellow  behind  your  chair 
has  of  taking  a  white  wife." 

"  If  you  speak  so  fast,"  answered  Dolly,  pertly,  *'  I  shall 
either  think  that  it  is  part  of  your  Methodist  religion  to 
swear  down  one's  throat  white  is  black;  or  else  that  yon 
are  the  most  deceived,  misused  young  man  who  has  ever 
been  chosen  a  bridegroom  without  his  consent  asked.  ' 

"Think  nothing  of  the  kind,  madam,"  replied  Caleb,  an- 
noyed and  indignant  at  her  folly;  "but  tell  me  right  out, 
if  your  high-church  religion  have  the  courage  and  the  hon- 
esty to  do  so — which,  to  be  sure,  I  doubt  not,"  he  corrected 
himself,  already  ashamed  of  his  recrimination.  '  \\  hat  do 
people  say  of  me?  They  must  needs  have  little  to  busy 
themselves  about  when  they  tell  cock-and-bull  stories  on 
so  trumpery  a  subject?" 


108  THE    HUGUENOT   FAillLY. 

"  They  do  say  extraordinary  things  of  you,  good  young 
sir,"  asserted  Dolly,  with  a  toss  of  her  head ;  "  they  say, 
of  a  verity,  that  you  are  right-down  affianced  to  your 
white-faced,  moon-struck  neighbor,  Ma'mselle  Yolande  Du- 
puy,  who,  if  she  be  not  a  Papist,  is  certainly  a  mystic,  so 
unlike  is  she  to  the  rest  of  her  sex — even  to  her  wise 
Grand'mere,  to  whose  apron- string  she  is  pinned.  I'd 
rather  have  had  Grand'mere,  sir ;  but  you'll  be  pinned  to 
her  likewise  all  the  same,  if  she  and  your  cracked  father 
have  courted  for  you,  and  engaged  you  without  so  much  as 
saying, '  By  your  leave.'  But  I  suppose  they  hold  you  so 
good  a  psalm-singing  boy  that  you  have  no  mind  or  will 
of  your  own  in  the  matter  ?  But  surely  in  common  justice 
they  will  let  you  know  before  the  banns  be  published,  that 
you  may  not  look  sheep-faced  or  grow  Avhite  about  the 
gills  before  the  whole  parish.  To  have  gotten  the  sack 
were  nought  to  it." 

Dolly  had  been  crammed  and  prompted  by  sharper  and 
more  malicious  rustic  wits  than  her  own,  or  she  never 
could  have  accomplished  all  these  smart  hits ;  but  the 
sense  of  this  only  galled  and  fired  Caleb  Gage's  manliness 
and  spirit  the  more. 

"  It  is  all  an  untruth,  an  absolute  untruth,  Mistress 
Rolle,"  he  declared,  cpiickly  and  positively,  "  so  manifest 
and  ridiculous  a  fabrication,  that  it  puzzles  me  reasonable 
people  should  combine — not  to  credit  it — that  they  can 
not  do — but  to  circulate  it." 

But  even  while  he  spoke  there  flashed  across  his  mem- 
ory the  coincidences,  not  only  that  his  father  had  that  very 
morning  sounded  him  as  to  his  opinion  of  every  member 
of  the  family  at  the  fShottery  Cottage,  and  had  pressed 
him  when  his  answers  were  careless  and  vague,  hut  that 
the  squire  had  repeatedly  of  late  taken  occasion  to  recom- 
mend him  to  unite  himself  with  another,  and  had  dwelt 
wistfully  on  his  own  happiness  in  the  wife  whom  he  had 
lost,  and  endeavored  to  ascertain  how  Caleb  stood  affect- 
ed to  such  a  change  of  condition.  The  young  man  had 
naturally  thought  t lie  discussion  uncalled  for  and  prema- 
ture, and  had  parried  it,  or  been  restive  under  it,  as  his 
temper  led  him.  But  now  that  these  recollections  flashed 
across  his  mind  inopportunely,  Caleb's  brown  face  flushed, 
and  he  contracted  his  square  brow  and  bit  his  lip-. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  109 

"  You  are  not  angry  with  me,  Mr.  Caleb  I"  cried  Dolly, 
shrugging  her  shoulders,  and  adding  slyly,  "  Men  arc  not 
angry  at  mere  idle  reports,  and  this  one  is  no  faialt  of  mine  ; 
I  did  not  raise  it.  I  had  it  from  my  mother,  and  she  had 
it  from  head-quarters — from  old  Madam  Dupuy,  upon  my 
life.  Xow,  be  as  angry  with  me  as  you  like ;  nobody  can 
say  that  I  can  help  it." 

The  result  of  the  spiteful  treachery  committed  at  Dr. 
Humphrey's  was  that  Caleb  Gage  was  tempted  for  twenty- 
four  hours  to  think  that  his  lather  and  the  Methodists 
were  right  in  abjuring  worldly  society,  and  that  he,  for 
one,  would  never  enter  it  again.  More  than  that,  on  the 
next  occasion  that  Caleb  passed  through  Sedge  Pond,  and 
conveyed  a  letter  from  his  father  to  Grand'mere,  he  refused 
obstinately  to  alight  and  partake  of  a  second  breakfast, 
or  even  to  sit  for  a  moment  and  exchange  greetings  at  the 
garden  gate.  And  when,  in  course  of  time,  Caleb  encoun- 
tered Grand'mere  and  Yolande  at  some  little  distance  near 
the  door  of  the  parish  church,  he  did  all  he  could  to  avoid 
the  encounter,  turned  his  head,  looked  another  way,  and 
behaved  in  all  respects  like  a  person  deeply  affronted. 

"  Somebody  has  growed  high  and  mighty  all  of  a  sud- 
dent,"  remarked  Priscille,  decisively;  "I  lay  the  young 
squire  of  the  Mall  have  got  a  flea  in  his  ear.  Sirrah! 
quotha,  if  that  be  your  Methody  humility  in  taking  the 
first  word  of  scolding,  I  woidd  not  give  my  head  for  the 
article ;  it  seems  to  me  it  do  come  out  of  the  same  put  as 
ourn  and  parson's  at  the  rectory,  after  all." 

"Adieu  paniers,  vintages  are  done  with,"  murmured 
Grand'mere,  soiTowfully.  She  was  not  so  much  offended 
as  hurt  at  the  smart  received  in  the  house  of  a  friend,  at 
trying  in  a  wearisome  struggle  to  dissever  the  wrong  from 
the  wrong-doer,  to  count  old  Squire  Gage  blameless,  and 
to  make  allowance  for  the  willfulness  and  perversity  of  the 
young  man.  Grand'mere  felt  that  she  had  made  a  griev- 
ous blunder  ;  not  in  the  step  she  had  taken — that  was  quite 
in  accordance  with  her  best  light  and  the  customs  of  her 
fathers — but  in  the  direction  into  which  the  step  had  car- 
ried her.  She  had  been  rash,  inconsiderate  of  English 
habits  and  tones  of  thought.  At  the  same  time  she  trust- 
ed with  all  her  good  heart  that  this  brave  garpon,  who  had 
slighted  her  child,  been  offended  by  their  gracious  prefer- 


110  THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

ence,  and  returned  it  with  what  in  French  eyes  was  little 
less  than  brutal  rudeness  and  marked  insult,  might  not, 
after  all,  prove  reprobate.  But  she  feared  much  that  her 
early  deprecation  of  the  free  footing  on  which  he  stood  with 
his  father  was  correct,  and  that  the  young  man  was  in  the 
first  stage  toward  the  blasted  ruin  of  lawlessness  and  infi- 
delity. 

Yolande  endured  for  a  longer  season  the  changing  moods 
of  the  Rolle  girls,  who  soon  began  to  condole  with  her  on 
the  failure  of  her  match,  and  this,  too,  in  accents  widely 
removed  from  the  spirit  of  their  unusual  contentment  with 
their  own  present  lot  and  confident  anticipations  of  good 
fortune  hi  the  future.  Then  Yolande  went  to  Grand'mere 
in  her  room,  stood  before  her,  and  looking  up  in  her 
face,  said — 

"  Grand'mere,  I  am  yours  to  do  with  what  you  will. 
Nothing  can  alter  that.  You  will  always  know  it  is  so. 
It  is  our  French  interpretation  of  a  child's  obedience  and 
devotion,  and  any  thing  else  to  us  is  mockery.  But  tell 
me,  Grand'mere,  and  do  not  call  me  insolent  for  asking  it 
(because,  see  you,  I  have  been  brought  up  in  this  harsh  En- 
gland, and  you  yourself  have  bidden  me  consort  with  loud- 
spoken  English  girls),  you  have  offered  me  to  this  young 
man,  and  he  has  rejected  me — is  it  not  so  ?" 

Yolande  spoke  with  scorn,  but  it  sounded  as  if  it  was 
scorn  of  herself,  and  of  no  other. 

"  You  put  it  in  hard  words,  Yolande,  which  is  to  pour 
the  drug  into  an  ugly  glass,"  remonstrated  Grand'mere, 
mildly.  "  It  suffices  that  there  was  a  project  of  marriage 
thought  of  for  you  by  your  friends,  which  on  thinking  over 
a  second  time  they  have  abandoned  by  mutual  consent — 
yes,  I  will  say  that  now.     Does  that  harm  you  ?" 

"I  do  not  know,  I  can  not  tell,"  hesitated  Yolande. 
"  You  had  the  right — you  would  serve  me  with  your  own 
dear  grey  hairs.  But  oh  !  Grand'mere,"  burst  out  Yolande, 
hiding  her'face  in  a  paroxysm  of  distress, "  why  would  you 
marry  me  if  you  risked  shaming  me  ?  Why  would  you 
many  me  at  all,  thrusting  me  on  some  man  who  docs  not 
want  me,  to  whom  I  should  be  a  burden  and  a  bugbear? 
Oli,  Grand'mere !  it  feels  like  shame,  hot  shame,  and  cruel 
wrong." 

"But,  surely,  this  is  morbid,"  Grand'mere  rebuked  her 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  Ill 

child,  in  a  little  displeasure  and  a  great  deal  more  anguish 
and  dismay.  "This  is  English  spleen  and  mad  pride,  of 
which  I  used  to  accuse  you  in  jest — foolish  jest.  Your 
mother  was  given  in  marriage ;  your  grandmother  before 
her.  Think  you  not  that  their  fathers  and  mothers  looked 
about  them  and  made  false  starts,  coUte  que  coute,  before 
they  fell  on  the  right  parti?  Are  you  so  much  better 
than  they  ?" 

"  I  am  no  better,  Grand'niere,  I  am  not  half  so  good. 
But  why  must  you  have  me  married  ?" 

"  You  may  be  left  alone  any  day,  you  must  be  one  day ; 
then  what  would  become  of  you,  my  child  ?  You  would 
have  bread  enough  to  eat,  that  is  true,  but  would  the 
world  leave  you  to  eat  it  in  peace  ?  Would  it  not  abuse 
and  betray  you  ?  There  are  no  retreats  for  the  Huguenots 
even  in  France,  there  never  was  any  but  aigue  morte  and 
the  prisons.  Women  may  live  single  in  England  without 
injury  or  scandal ;  but  I  have  not  seen  it — it  is  not  the 
way  in  our  country.  It  is  only  that  I  have  been  a  stupid 
old  woman  hi  your  interests,  Jifille,  and  I  am  very  sorry 
for  it." 

"Do  not  say  that,  Grand'mere.  It  is  a  trifle,  a  tuft  of 
thistle-down,  I  mock  at  it.  There,  I  toss  it  from  me  and 
catch  it  again  for  my  own  amusement,  don't  you  see  ?  A 
man  is  free  to  have  his  choice,  and  his  refusal  breaks  neither 
my  neck  nor  my  heart,  though  it  throws  a  stone  at  me. 
Rest  tranquil,  Grand'mere.  Let  us  return  to  our  sheep, 
our  lace,  to  what  you  were  telling  me  of  your  pigeons,  your 
herbs  at  home  in  Languedoc." 

"It  is  well,"  said  Grand'mere  to  herself;  "  it  is  but  the 
girl's  spirit  which  is  wounded,  her  heart  is  mute  like  a  lit- 
tle fish,  sleeps  as  a  sabot — and  so  it  should,  till  it  wake  up 
by  her  husband's  side.  Who  would  rouse  and  force  it  into 
lift'  sooner  ?" 

Ah!  short-sighted  Grarid'mere,  if  Yolande's  had  been  a 
nuan,  jealous,  grasping  temper,  you  might  have  been  se- 
cure; Caleb  Gage's  repudiation  and  aversion  would  have 
done  its  work.  But  with  the  small  value  Xolande  Bet 
upon  herself,  and  the  large  value  you  taught  her  to  put 
on  Caleb  Gage,  teaching  all  the  more  effectual  that  it  had 
no  direct  personal  reference;  the  impressions  which  you 
had  labored  to  give  to  her  of  the  young  squire's  manliness, 


112  THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

liberality,  truth,  and  tenderness — impressions  made  on  a 
surface  altogether  blank,  and  capable  of  lightly  and  rapid- 
ly receiving  them,  and  weaving  them  into  a  young  girl's 
pure,  graceful  dreams; — it  seemed  no  more  than  natural 
to  Yolande  that  Caleb  Gage  should  have  nothing  to  say 
to  her,  there  was  no  flaw  in  his  nobility  on  that  ac- 
count, since  he  had  not  made  a  single  advance  from  which 
he  had  drawn  back.  It  was  just,  it  was  almost  right  that 
he  should  not  find  her  worthy,  he  would  not  be  less  a  hero 
in  the  girl's  magnanimous  eyes  because  of  that.  And  she 
felt,  with  a  throb  of  generous  thankfulness,  that  she  was 
not  so  unworthy  as  that  came  to,  though  he  might  have 
pained  and  humiliated  her,  and  mingled  a  single  strain  of 
loving  despair  in  the  original  gravity  and  thoughtfulness 
of  her  youth. 

Days  passed  over  the  cottage,  and  Grand'mere  watched 
Yolande  covertly  and  incessantly,  and  saw,  under  the  fair 
front  which  the  young  girl  was  sedulous  to  preserve,  that 
she  was  still  abstracted,  and  only  fitfully  interested  hi 
what  was  passing  around  her.  She  was  liable  to  flashes 
of  feverish  restlessness  and  flushes  of  bitter  mortification, 
and  she  sighed  long  and  sorely  when  she  thought  nobody 
heard  her  drawing  those  deep,  sad  breaths,  which,  it  is  not 
altogether  a  figure  to  say,  drain  the  life  blood  from  the 
heart.  Grand'mere  believed  it  was  high  time  to  interfere 
and  speak  to  Yolande,  to  seek  to  probe  the  wound  which 
she  had  helped  to  inflict,  with  purer  fingers. 

"  Yolandette,"  she  addressed  the  girl,  lying  wide  awake 
in  the  hush  of  night,  with  no  light  upon  her  but  that  of 
the  pale  moon  and  the  dim  lamp,  "  hide  nothing  from  me ; 
it  is  my  due,  for  I  have  nursed  you  in  my  bosom,  and  if  I 
have  hurt  you  I  have  a  double  right  to  know  all." 

"  To  what  good,  Grand'mere  ?"  pleaded  Yolande ;  "  you 
will  but  widen  the  breach  between  me  and  my  old  self, 
and  increase  the  scandal." 

"  I  will  not ;  I,  an  old  mother,  will  show  you  what  is 
worth  all  the  sorrow,  and  will  bring  you  consolation." 

"  J  low  can  you,  Grand'mere  ?"  objected  Yolande,  incred- 
ulously and  desperately.  "  There  is  consolation  for  great, 
splendid  griefs,  but  not  for  a  girl's  weak,  vain  delusions, 
though  they  cause  her  to  fret  and  pine  for  them.  Conso- 
lation does  not  demean  itself  to  such  poor,  common,  child- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  113 

ish  trials  as  these.  Let  me  be,  Grand'mere ;  let  me  rather 
crush  them  down,  beat  them  like  a  stone  under  my  feet. 
Trust  me,  I  am  wiser  than  my  elder  in  this." 

"N"o,  no,  that  is  a  villainous  mode — a  heathen  mode. 
Consolation  is  heavenly;  if  it  were  not  so,  I  grunt  you  it 
would  not  stoop  so  low  ;  and  yet,  without  that  royal  con- 
descension to  the  least  and  the  silliest  soul,  it  would  not 
be  big  enough  even  for  earth.  Listen  to  me,  Yolande  : 
dost  thou  feel  womanly  betimes,  and  as  the  heavy  price 
of  thy  womanliness,  dost  thou  recognize  thyself  in  the 
morning  of  thy  day  as  '  a  woman  forsaken,'  despised  in  thy 
youth?  So  thou  art  called,  in  the  words  of  the  Bible, 
which  were  not  spoken  to  a  low-born,  tormented,  embit- 
tered woman  truly,  but  to  the  true  Israel,  the  spiritual 
Church.  Notwithstanding,  there  are  the  words  and  the 
figures,  and  what  will  you— that  it  was  the  sympathy  of 
the  stern  old  prophet  which  breathed  through  their  mar- 
velous tenderness,  or  that  it  was  Another  who  put  them 
into  Isaiah's  wild  imagination  and  on  the  burning  lips 
which  the  live  coal  had  touched — Another,  the  Friend  of 
publicans  and  sinners,  and  of  weak  women  as  well  as  strong 


men." 


"  Are  there  such  words,  Grand'mere  ?"  whispered  Yo- 
lande, stirred  and  softened  with  awe  and  emotion.  "1 
have  read  the  Bible  every  morning  and  every  evening, 
like  other  Huguenot  girls,  but  I  never  discovered  them 
or  took  them  to  myself." 

"Xay,  nor  do  we  ever,  ma  rnie,  till  Ave  want  them,  or 
the  Spirit  shine  upon  them,  because  the  well  of  Scripture 
is  deep;  still,  truth  is  at  the  bottom  of  the  well,  Yolande, 
waiting  for  us  wdien  we  need  it,  if  we  will  have  it.  Listen 
better,  Yolande."  The  lamp  was  trimmed;  Grand'mere 
took  out  her  Rochelle  Bible  from  beneath  the  pillow,  fixed 
her  glasses,  and  with  her  shrunk  ivory  finger  turned  over 
the  yellow  pages  and  pointed  to  the  spot,  producing  more 
convincing  effect,  and  one  more  in  keeping  with  moral  and 
spiritual  powers  than  when  she  and  Squire  Gage  had  re- 
course to  thi>  S'u'tcs  Biblicce. 

"Fear  not;  for  thou  shalt  not  be  ashamed:  neither  be 
thou  confounded;  for  thou  shalt  not  be  put  to  shame:  for 
thou  shalt  forget  the  shame  of  thy  youth,  and  shalt  not  i.  - 
member  the  reproach  of  thy  widowhood  any  more. 


114  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

"  For  thy  Maker  is  thine  husband ;  The  Lord  of  Hosts 
is  his  name  ;  and  thy  Redeemer  the  Holy  One  of  Israel ; 
The  God  of  the  whole  earth  shall  he  be  called. 

"  For  the  Lord  hath  called  thee  as  a  woman  forsaken 
and  grieved  in  spirit,  and  a  wife  of  youth,  when  thou  wast 
refused,  saith  thy  God." 

"  Grand'mere,"  said  Yolande,  quivering  with  eagerness, 
"  the  remembrance  is,  oh  !  so  sweet  from  the  great  Bride- 
groom. I  shall  hold  up  my  head  again;  I  shall  look  him 
in  the  face  again,  Grand'mere.  I  shall  not  mind  how  I  am 
laughed  at  and  lightly  esteemed ;  I  shall  think  that  I  am 
good  for  something  since  my  foolish  yearning  heart  is  read 
by  Him  who  numbereth  the  stars  and  calleth  the  roll  of 
prophets  and  martyrs,  and  ordereth  the  march  of  empires 
and  worlds." 


CHAPTER  X. 

THE   EOLLES    OF   THE    CASTLE. 

Reedham  was  one  of  those  old-fashioned  towns  in  which 
the  jail  was  the  central  ornament.  The  shops  were  low- 
browed, and  not  much  better  than  hucksters'  stalls  ;  but 
there  was  the  beauty  of  irregularity  about  the  better  class 
of  houses,  advancing  and  retreating  as  they  did  on  the 
causeway,  and  showing  genuine  antique  oriel  windows  and 
balconies,  with  occasional  vines  festooning  and  tinting 
afresh  the  red  brick. 

One  day  in  early  spring  the  rector  of  Sedge  Pond  had 
occasion  to  ride  into  Reedham.  Approaching  the  market 
cross,  he  could  not  help  uttering  an  exclamation  as  he  saw 
a  large  printed  placard  posted  there,  signed  "Audrey 
Rolle."  A  considerable  gathering  of  rustics  and  towns- 
people gaped  round  it. 

"  Hath  my  lady  put  the  crown  on  her  vagaries  and  her 
usurpation  of  a  man's  place  by  proposing  to  sit  in  Parlia- 
ment herself?"  mused  the  rector.  "indeed,  there  re-. 
mains  only  this,  that  she  and  the  like  of  her  have  not  tried  ; 
and,  by  my  word,  if  they  set  their  minds  on  it,  neither 
king   nor   constitution    will   balk   them.      Alake !    alake ! 


THE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  115 

what  waste  of  high  spirit  and  high  heart  is  there,  and 
what  might  not  my  Lady  Rolle  have  been  and  done,  had 
she  been  born  a  man,  and  been  set  down  in  the  shoes  of 
Cornwallis,  or  Burgoyne,  or  Rodney,  or  Anson,  or  Sir 
Robert,  or  the  Duke  of  Newcastle,  or  even  of  the  Bishop 
of  London,  or  he  of  Bath  and  Wells  ?  As  it  is,  all  her  wit 
doth  not  serve  to  keep  her  at  home,  abiding  by  her  still- 
room  and  her  needle,  ruling  her  maids,  and  saying  her 
prayers,  like  my  simple  wife  and  maids,  who  will  be  all 
agog  at  the  mere  thought  of  their  patroness  being  in  the 
country  again." 

The  rector  was  somewhat  relieved,  however,  when  he 
found  that  the  address  only  called  on  the  men  of  Reed- 
ham  to  be  early  at  the  poll,  and  vote  for  the  Honorable 
George  Rolle.  It  concluded  with  the  words :  "  As  a 
mother  who  has  already  given  a  son  to  her  country,  and 
as  the  just  price  of  her  loss,  I  call  upon  my  friends  and 
neighbors  to  elect  his  brother,  my  next  son,  as  their  fitting 
representative  in  Parliament." 

"  Glad  am  I  that  it  is  the  Honorable  George,  and  not 
herself,  whom  my  lady  proposes,  though  she  is  a  great 
deal  better  man  than  he  is,"  thought  the  rector.  "  And 
so  she  makes  gain  of  her  poor  hero,  even  for  the  honor  and 
ad  vantage  of  the  bouse  and  of  her  remaining  sons.  "Would 
I  thus  make  gain  of  the  pure  memory  of  my  Philip  ?  -Nay, 
perish  the  thought  of  all  that  was  earthly  in  our  connec- 
tion.  Let  him  henceforth  shine  as  a  star  in  the  firmament 
for  me;  and  let  me  obey  my  Master's  orders,  look  up  to 
Him,  and  covet  earnestly  to  die  in  harness,  fulfilling  the 
measure  of  my  duty  as  my  boy  fulfilled  his,  and  following 
the  Captain  of  our  salvation.  Nevertheless,  I  am  a  Rolle  ; 
and  I  owe  my  best  duty  to  my  lady,  who  has  been  good 
and  kind  to  me  according  to  her  light,  and  my  supporl  to 
the  Honorable  George,  who  I  am  assured  will  never  set 
the  Thames  on  fire,  save  by  dawdling  between  London 
and  Paris,  and  heaping  together  pretty  things  like  a  vain 
Avoman.  Still,  how  these  puny  fine  gentlemen  do  shake 
off  their  affectations  and  follies,  and  strip  and  fight  like 
men  in  the  senate,  bailing  out  and  forcing  back  the  roar- 
ing tide  of  loathsome  bilge-water — anarchy,  infidelity, and 
horrible  confusion,  like  what  has  fallen  out  in  His  Majesty's 
colony  of  America,  which  threatens  to  become  the  grave 


11G  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

of  true  loyalty  and  virtue,  in  spite  of  hecatombs  of  corpses 
and  rivers  of  gore  poured  into  it,  my  Philip's  gallant  body 
and  generous  blood  among  the  rest." 

The  first  sight  Grand'mere  and  Yolande  had  of  Lady 
Rolle  was  in  the  obscurity  of  a  whirlwind  of  dust  raised 
by  her  chariot  and  that  of  her  son,  as  they  drove  past 
Sedge  Pond  to  the  castle.  But  when  once  the  family 
were  lodged  in  their  proper  quarters,  there  was  no  longer 
any  dimness  or  uncertainty  about  the  fact  of  their  pres- 
ence. Every  thing  was  turned  upside  down  for  them,  and 
every  movement  Was  thenceforth  directed  toward  them. 
They  were  like  the  sun  in  the  sky,  drinking  in  and  absorb- 
ing all  the  exhalations,  and  in  their  central  power  controll- 
ing the  growth  and  progress  of  every  living  creature  around 
them.  From  the  rector  in  his  surplice  to  Deborah  Pott 
between  her  water-pitchers,  no  one  was  exempt  from  the 
influence  of  the  quality. 

Grand'mere  at  first  tried  to  resist  the  spell,  and  in  a  fit 
of  national  spirit  talked  of  the  great  peers  of  France,  the 
provincial  parliaments,  the  lieutenants  of  the  king,  and  the 
governors  of  provinces,  compared  with  whom  this  English 
family  were  mere  titled  gentry,  with  mortgaged  acres,  and 
no  power  except  that  derived  from  their  seats  in  Parlia- 
ment, where  they  most  undauntedly  voted  to  each  other 
sinecure  upon  sinecure. 

But  Grand'mere  changed  her  mind  after  she  had  wit- 
nessed  the  Rolles'  rule  for  a  week,  and  seen  the  dem- 
onstrations at  the  village  in  the  little  church.  The  church 
was  situated  witli  a  manifest  respect  to  persons,  inasmuch 
as  it  forced  upon  the  village  Christians  a  weary  trudge 
through  a  miry  by-way;  while  the  castle  Christians,  who 
were  not  at  the  castle  above  once  in  two  years,  and  only 
filled  two  pews  when  they  were  all  at  home,  commanded 
an  easy  road  by  a  side  door  from  the  park.  There  was 
such  a  scene  there  as  Grand'mere  had  never  witnessed  in 
Roman  Catholic  France,  where  the  great  dignitaries  of  the 
Church,  which  aspires  to  rule  the  earth,  exacted  homage 
and  humility  from  rival  dignitaries,  temporal  princes,  and 
peers,  and  did  not  often  brook  any  claims  save  their  own 
:it  the  gates  of  either  their  noblest  cathedrals  or  their  sim- 
ple parish  churches.  It  was  another  mutter  when  Lady 
Rolle  appeared  in  the  porch  of  the  church  at  Sedge  Pond. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  117 

She  was  attended  by  her  maid,  chaplain,  physician,  butler, 
and  sometimes  by  one  of  her  sons,  who  with  his  bodily  eye 
would  stare  at  the  scraps  of  stained  glass  which  he  had 
often  seen  before,  instead  of  looking  with  his  mental  eyes 
into  Heaven,  to  which  it  was  doubtful  if  his  imagination 
had  ever  taken  flight.  Nay,  he  would  audibly  remark  on 
a  rusty  iron  sword  on  the  monument  of  one  of  his  fore- 
fathers, which  would  never  pink  armor  or  slash  buff  coat 
more,  at  the  very  moment  when  the  priest  was  praying 
for  the  sword  of  the  Spirit  to  pierce  the  souls  of  those  pres- 
ent, and  that  of  the  son  among  them.  Wlien  the  castle 
party  issued  from  their  own  particular  door,  the  worship- 
ers, who  had  flocked  out  before  them,  divided  right  and 
left,  uncovered  their  heads,  and  bowed  down  as  before 
divinities  ;  while  the  rector  in  his  cassock,  and  his  wife 
and  daughters  in  their  sacks  and  hats,  hastened  to  show 
a  proper  example  of  reverence  to  superiors.  At  that 
crowning  testimony  Grand'mere  grew  very  thoughtful,  and 
in  place  of  undervaluing  the  Rolles  of  the  castle  any  longer, 
she  called  them  a  great  institution,  an  ordinance  of  God, 
for  good  or  for  evil,  according  as  it  was  used  or  abused. 

Monsieur — an  avowed  time-server,  notwithstanding  his 
irony — bowed  low  before  the  men  of  the  castle  when 
they  came  down  to  the  village  to  see  a  cock-fight,  or  play 
a  game  at  skittles,  or  make  trial  of  then-  horses  entered 
for  Newmarket,  in  the  presence  of  a  crowd  of  obsequious 
helpers  and  hangers-on.  These  Rolles  were  not  mere  roys- 
tering  country  quality  —  not  men  of  many  glaring  sins 
and  a  few  redeeming  virtues,  like  the  publicans  and  sin- 
ners of  old.  They  were  more  dangerous  and  difficult 
subjects  to  deal  with — men  of  the  court  and  the  town, 
men  of  wit  and  fashion,  of  taste  and  refinement.  They  were 
not  so  much  men  of  strong  passions  as  of  overweening 
vanity,  and  its  complement,  cynicism.  In  their  small  hats 
and  wigs,  plain  black  ribbons  or  white  ties,  they  Lounged, 
as  if  half  asleep,  in  the  approaches  to  the  castle,  and  only 
roused  themselves  to  pick  their  slippered  steps,  and  carry 
their  little  French  poodles  and  Italian  greyhounds  care- 
fully over  the  puddles;  while  they  stood,  took  pinches  of 
snuff,  betted,  laughed,  swore,  and  contemplated  enjoyably 
two  barges  running  foul  of  each  other  on  the  river;  for, 
just  as  the  degenerate  Romans  patted  and  petted  their 


118  THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

gladiators,  these  affectedly  squeamish,  womanish  men  were 
very  fond  of  supping  on  horrors. 

Monsieur  bowed  still  lower  before  my  lady,  who,  as 
distinguished  from  my  lord,  swept  along  in  such  piled-up 
tissues,  jewels,  powder,  and  plumes  as  only  the  great  ones 
of  the  earth  could  compass.  She  looked,  as  if  she  had 
been  born  to  wear  them;  and  she  never  rested  day  or 
night,  but,  with  her  marvelously  fine  fretted  features  and 
falcon  look,  was  forever  pursuing  some  aim  with  head- 
long, devouring  intentness,  and  the  moment  it  was  attain- 
ed, setting  out  after  some  other  objects,  no  matter  what, 
so  that  it  was  hers  to  be  sought  after  and  gained. 

Madame,  Yolande's  mother,  looked  darkly  at  those  priv- 
ileged players  in  a  pageant,  and  called  them  Ahabs  and 
Jezebels,  Herods  and  Herodiases,  and  poured  forth  denun- 
ciations of  "  baldness  in  place  of  well-set  hair,  and  burning 
for  beauty."  Yolande,  too,  looking  with  open,  unconscious 
eyes  at  the  new  and  striking  figures  on  the  stage  of  her 
life,  and  shrinking  from  the  mocking,  irreverent,  unbeliev- 
ing light  alike  in  the  soft,  sleepy  eyes  of  the  men,  and  the 
ardent  eyes  of  the  woman,  was  tempted  to  say  to  Grand'- 
mere— 

"Are  they  not  like  Vashti,  grown  old  and  worn,  but 
never  weary  ?  Do  these  unflinching  spirits  ever  weary, 
Grand'mere  ?  or  do  they  only  wear  and  wear,  until  the 
good  God  break  them,  and  take  them  brokenly  to  Him- 
self, and  make  of  them  the  spirits  which  constitute  heroes 
and  martyrs  ?  And  the  men,  Grand'mere,  are  they  not  so 
many  Absaloms?  I  like  them  not.  I  like  my  lady,  who 
is  eager  to  make  us  fear  her — so  eager,  that  she  would 
tread  over  the  necks  and  the  hearts  of  the  people,  and  her 
own  also,  Grand'mere — her  own  also.  The  men  are  false 
and  cruel  in  their  sleekness ;  they  would  sacrifice  others, 
but  save  themselves,  such  as  they  are ;  I  know  it — I  feel  it." 

"  Yes,  until  to-morrow  with  your  knowledge  and  feel- 
ings," reproved  Grand'mere,  soberly  and  sadly.  "  Who 
made  you  a  judge  between  this  woman  and  these  men,  or 
between  them  and  yourself?  Better  shut  you  up  in  a  port- 
folio at  once,  Mademoiselle  my  judge,  than  suffer  you  to 
look  abroad  with  rash,  harsh  eyes  and  tongue.  '  By  then- 
fruits  ye  shall  know  them?'  Yes,  truly;  but  these  are 
the  brethren  ;  even  an  Apostle  had  nought  to  do  hi  judg- 


THE    HUGUEXOT    FAMILY.  119 

ing  those  who  were  without.  And  what  fruits  have  you 
gathered  of  this  great  Rolle  family  ?" 

"  Well,  Grand'mere,  I  see  enough  of  then  mincing  airs 
every  day ;  I  can  scarce  look  at  them  when  I  see  them  in 
the  walks." 

"Ah!  my  heart,  do  you  believe  the  Lord,  when  He  tells 
how  hard  it  is  to  be  rich  ?  Do  you  ever — I  do  not  say 
thank  the  Lord  that  you  are  not  of  the  haute  noblesse — 
that  were  the  Pharisee's  prayer — pray  to  Him  on  behalf 
of  those  poor  souls  of  whom  He  said  that  it  was  as  easy 
for  a  camel  to  go  through  the  eye  of  a  needle  as  for  them 
to  enter  his  kingdom  ?  But  when  they  do  go  through  the 
eye  of  a  needle,  think  you  not  they  are  such  as  are  made 
rulers  over  ten  cities  ?  But  we  are  as  silly  and  selfish  as 
the  little  birds  toward  the  cats  :  we  are  unbelievers  ;  and 
instead  of  praying  for  the  rich  and  helping  them,  we  envy 
them  and  o-o  on  hating  and  maligning  them." 

"  Oh,  Grand'mere  !"  cried  Yolande,  with  a  sharp,  pained 
voice. 

"Alas!  it  is  true,  my  child,  and  the  harsher  our  judg- 
ments the  greater  will  be  our  condemnation!  Ma  mie,  I 
think  of  a  chapter  in  my  Bible,  and  I  try  to  show  you  a 
better  way  in  which  to  regard  these  messieurs.  See  you 
how  they  stand  to  look  at  and  admire  a  group  of  trees  in 
the  park,  a  herd  of  deer,  the  tower  of  the  church  from  one 
point,  and  their  own  arcade  from  another.  Nay,  they  can 
admire  a  pretty  child  of  the  village,  so  that  she  be  clean 
washed  for  their  inspection,  and  put  not  her  finger  hi  her 
mouth,  or  whimper  and  hint  that  she  is  thinly  clad  and 
coarsely  fed,  and  so  rub  against  their  skins,  and,  as  they 
say,  dispel  the  illusion." 

"Ah  !  yes,  that  is  true;  I  have  seen  them,"  responded 
Eolande,  thoughtfully. 

"They  have  the  sense  of  beauty,  Yolande, and  beauty  is 
the  gift  of  God.  See  you  again  how  they  caress  their  little 
dogs,  and  niourn  when  the  Rosines  and  the  Rosettes  hang 
their  heads  or  droop  their  tails.  But  that  is  unworthy  of 
men  who  have  the  whole  world  of  men  and  women  to  care 
for,  you  will  tell  me.  Well,  I  can  not  say  as  to  that  ;  for 
the  great  God  cares  for  the  brutes  as  well  as  for  men  and 
women,  and  so  I  do  not  understand  that  branch  of  the 
argument." 


120  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

"  But  it  seems  only  a  waste  of  tenderness,  Grand'niere." 
"  Yes,  yes,  I  admit  it  is  a  waste  of  tenderness  in  those 
who  have  little  of  the  commodity  to  spare.  Still  it  is  ten- 
derness, and  that  is  a  nobler  gift  of  God  than  beauty.- 
And  now  I  will  tell  you  something  that  you  see  not  (may 
you  never  see  it !),  but  what  the  common  voice  says  of  the 
strange  gentlemen.  In  their  conduct  to  their  women  they 
are  alternately  savage  and  sweet.  The  most  terrible 
wrongs,  the  most  barbarous  outrages,  have  been  commit- 
ted by  strong  brothers  against  weak  sisters,  as  if  the  strong- 
were  demons  ;  and  then,  again,  they  act  as  if  the  pitying 
angels  had  dispossessed  the  demons,  and  had  not  disdain- 
ed to  take  up  their  abode  for  a  season  in  the  dishonored 
dwellings.  My  simple  one,  it  is  not  that  this  man  or  that 
woman  is  a  sinner  above  all  other  sinners,  but  that  the 
foundations  of  the  world  are  out  of  order,  and  that  all  our 
pleasant  springs  are  poisoned,  our  good  gifts  marred.  We 
are  all  sinners,  great  and  small,  as  opportunities  have  en- 
abled us  or  grace  prevented  us.  We  are  all  sinners,  and 
— God  be  praised! — one  is  our  Saviour.  Leave  Him  to 
judge,  and  judge  thou  no  more." 

Lady  Rolle  had  only  a  faint  impression  of  the  Dupuys 
as  being  the  foreign  tenants  of  the  Shottery  Cottage. 
Madame  Rolle  of  the  rectory  and  her  girls  spoke  of  them 
to  the  great  lady,  but,  sooth  to  say,  the  great  lady  paid 
little  heed  to  such  speech,  calling  it,  in  her  sarcastic  phrase, 
the  cackle  of  ignorant  country  geese.  But  Lady  Rolle, 
when  the  living  book  was  in  her  hands,  read  a  man  better 
than  most  readers,  and  esteemed  Mr.  Philip,  her  friend  and 
kinsman,  more  than  any  man  alive,  though  it  must  be  con- 
fessed she  showed  it  quite  as  often  by  vexing  as  by  pleas- 
ing him.  And  when  he  actually  spoke  of  the  Dupuys  not 
unfavorably,  her  ladyship  took  it  into  her  head  to  pay 
them  a  visit.  She  had,  of  course,  no  notion  but  that  she 
could  do  any  thing  she  liked  at  Sedge  Pond,  and  be  every- 
where humbly  received  and  meekly  deferred  to ;  and  so 
she  went  about  deranging  every  thing  like  some  powerful, 
semi-malignant  fairy.  Her  ladyship  walked  straight  into 
the  Shottery  Cottage  one  day — right  into  the  sombre  par- 
lor, and  sat  down,  in  Madame  Dupuy's  chair,  without  in- 
vitation or  leave.  She  caught  a  glimpse  of  Grand'mere  as 
she  was  looking  round  her,  quite  prepared  to  domineer  and 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  121 

to  find  fault  before  she  should  make  up  for  her  bad  be- 
havior by  showering  upon  the  occupants  her  prodigal 
money  and  favors.  She  jumped  up  instantly,  begged 
Grand'mere's  pardon,  and  craved  permission  to  call  her, 
on  the  spot,  a  dear  old  friend.  From  that  fresh  starting- 
point  Lady  Rolle  poured  her  winning,  wonderfully  idio- 
matic, though  broken  French  into  her  listener's  credulous 
ears,  and  conducted  herself  toward  Grand'mere  as  an 
amiable  fine  lady,  unique  and  exquisite  in  her  amiability, 
no  less  than  in  her  humors  and  vices. 

Not  that  Lady  Rolle  ceased  to  be  herself:  she  reflected 
on  Grand'mere's  family  just  a  little  of  her  bland  good-will. 
She  said  distinctly  to  Madame — 

"  My  good  creature,  you  detest  me  at  first  sight.  Have 
I  such  a  bad  taste,  then,  in  a  recluse's  mouth  ?  So  much 
the  worse  for  you,  because  I  can  really  do  without  your 
liking,  unless  you  put  my  dear  old  friend  here  up  against 
me ;  whereas  I  might  have  been  of  some  service  to  you, 
and  been  at  ease  in  offering  you  the  run  of  the  castle  gar- 
dens, dairy,  dove-cote,  and  farm,  all  the  year  round  ;  in  put- 
ting a  stop  to  the  hobnailed  louts  molesting  you,  and  com- 
pelling the  county  to  be  civil  to  you.  Reflect  what  you 
have  lost  by  finding  in  me  your  bete  noire,  your  croqucml- 
taine.'1''  Addressing  herself  coolly  to  Monsieur,  she  went 
on :  "  Sir,  I  shall  have  no  scruple  in  being  useful  to  you. 
If  I  mistake  not,  you  understand  the  commerce  of  society. 
What  will  you  take  in  exchange  for  permitting  me  to  be 
intimate  with  your  mother  and  your  daughter  ?  Do  I  not 
know  that  you  will  receive  no  injury  from  the  words  of  a 
plain  Englishwoman  ?  You  are  too  wise  a  man  of  the 
world.     Is  it  not  so  ?" 

"Precisely,  my  lady;  you  comprehend  perfectly  the 
character  of  the  boiirg ■eois  who  is  dying  with  the  wish  to 
make  a  market  of  every  thing,  without  the  exception  of 
mother  and  child.  I  shall  ask  my  price — when  I  want  it." 
So  Monsieur  met  her  challenge,  raising  his  shoulders  and 
showing  his  teeth. 

And  Lady  Rolle  told  Yolandc:  "  Child,  I  could  be  vast- 
ly fond  of  you,  and  carry  you  oft*  will  he,  nill  he,  to  take 
the  place  of  my  last  scarlet  spider;  for  1  am  getting  up  a 
collection  of  monsters  to  outshine  Margaret  Cavendish's. 
I  warn  you,  my  good  mother,  that  I  worry  all  my  friends' 

F 


122  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

hearts  out  of  their  bodies  to  help  me  with  strange  beasts, 
now  that  I  have  done  with  Greek  marbles.  But,  child, 
you  are  not  all  your  grandmother.  I  spy  your  mother  in 
your  face ;  and,  as  you  see,  she  and  I  no  more  take  to  each 
other  than  plaguey  teeth  to  gritting  sand.  There,  don't 
take  the  pet,  you  little  fool;  perhaps  hers  is  all  the  hon- 
ester  nature  for  not  agreeing  with  mine.  After  sinners 
themselves,  only  saints  and  angels  can  put  up  with  sinners ; 
don't  you  know  that  ?  Be  thankful,  at  least,  that  your 
mother  is  not  a  sinner  of  the  same  stuff  as  the  French 
mothers  whom  I  have  known  were  made  of.  What  were 
they  like  ?  Bah !  Painted  goddesses,  ready  to  tear  out 
the  eyes  of  their  own  daughters,  making  frights  of  them, 
outraging  them,  to  keep  them  from  stepping  on  the  tapis 
with  themselves.  I  thank  my  stars  that  I  have  only  long 
lazybones  and  grinning  buffoons  of  sons,  lest  I  should  have 
seen  rivals  in  my  daughters,  and  bitten  and  devoured  my 
own  flesh  and  blood.  But  if  the  mothers  were  no  better 
than  they  should  be,  how  did  it  happen  that  the  grandames 
were  too  good  for  this  bad  world  ?  Sure  I  can  not  tell. 
My  wise  head  will  not  crack  riddles  like  nuts.  Grand'- 
mere,  you  are  not  vexed  with  me  ?  Nay,  then,  I  shall  con- 
fess that  I  have  been  only  in  ill  company,  that  to  the  gad- 
flies all  the  poor  midges  figure  as  gadflies.  Yes,  yes,  that 
is  it;  and  the  French  mothers  are  without  reproach, 
like  the  old  mesdames — like  channing,  wise,  witty  De  Se- 
vigne, whom  Ave  all  dote  upon,  down  to  that  snarling  dog, 
Rolle.  You  are  her  marrow,  my  dear,  beautiful  old  goody  ! 
only  what  a  pity  that  you  are  bourgeoise  and  Huguenot. 
Could  you  not  be  at  least  orthodox  Catholic  here,  where 
it  would  not  be  a  feather  in  your  cap — quite  the  contrary ; 
so  that  you  would  still  have  the  comfort  of  contradicting 
everybody  and  continuing  a  martyr?" 

"Pity  that  she  is  a,  Huguenot ! — Be  a  Catholic  !"  gasp- 
ed Madame.  "  Why  does  not  the  earth  open  and  swal- 
low her  up?  Mon  ma/ri,  you  stand  by  and  hear  your 
mother  insulted,  the  faith  mocked!  Go  ;  I  had  not  thought 
you  so  wicked.  Who  is  this  scaramouche  of  a  He  Sevigne  ? 
I  know  her  not ;  I  abjure  her,  for  the  company  she  keeps." 

"  Ah  !  be  quiet,  my  good  woman,"  enjoined  Lady  Rolle, 
tranquilly;  "I  do  not  mind  you,  He  Sevigne"  does  not 
mind  you.     Alas !  she  has  only  existed  for  us  in  her  like- 


T1IE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  123 

ness  this  half  century  and  more.  But  it  is  refreshing  to 
find  man  or  woman  who  helieves  any  thing,  and  who  is 
not  to  say  rude  in  her  faith." 

Lady  Kolle  courtesied  politely  to  Madame  (who  turned 
her  back  with  an  exasperated  mow),  tapped  the  reluctant 
Yolande  under  the  chin,  kissed  the  hand  of  Grand'mere, 
and  presented  her  own  hand  to  Monsieur,  with  the  most 
ineffable  air  of  condescension,  to  be  led  to  her  chariot, 
which  was  standing  there  in  its  empty  splendor,  mobbed 
by  the  people  of  Sedge  Pond. 

That  very  afternoon  Lady  Rolle  sent  her  own  serving- 
man  and  woman  with  hampers  of  red  Burgundy  and  white 
Hermitage,  baked  meats,  and  fruits,  along  with  the  last 
fashions  and  working-materials,  to  Grand'mere ;  thus  over- 
powering the  least  mercenary  but  the  most  grateful  spirit 
in  the  world.  Madame,  however,  put  her  hands  doggedly 
behind  her  back,  and  refused  to  touch  the  unclean  thing. 
With  the  hampers  came  a  little  note,  which  began  with 
an  apology  for  her  handwriting  (she  never  could  write, 
my  lady  said),  and  requesting  permission  to  wait  upon 
Grand'mere,  and  to  bring  her  dish  of  tea  with  her,  any 
time  she  could  spare  from  the  great  business  of  the  elec- 
tion, which  she  was  to  set  agoing  the  next  week.  Stic 
Avas  shocking  bad  company  herself,  and  was  but  poorly 
supplied  with  any  other  up  at  the  castle;  she  had  no 
stomach  for  the  dull,  conceited  country  gentry,  though  she 
would  not  have  said  that  for  a  jjension  just  then.  What 
she  would  like,  would  be  to  gossip  by  the  hour  about  her 
dear,  delightful  Madame  de  Sevigne. 

Madame  de  Sevigne  was  the  key  to  Grand'mere's  charm 
for  Lady  Kolle,  just  as  Fletcher  of  Madeley  had  been  the 
key  to  her  attraction  for  the  old  squire  of  the  Mall.  In 
the  teeth  of  the  old,  bitter  grudge  against  the  French, 
which  the  middle  and  the  lower  classes  were  given  to 
cherish  as  being  patriotic,  the  quality  had  not  only  the 
strong  tendency  to  Gallic  fashions  of  which  young  Caleb 
Gage  was  unjustly  accused, but  they  had  a  greal  rage  for 
one  wonderfully  endowed  woman,  whose  Christian  virtues 
and  heathen  insensibility,  in  the  midst  of  the  depravityof 
the  court  air  she  breathed,  they  were  equally  incapable 
of  measuring  and  appreciating.  Nevertheless,  Lea  Roc- 
hers,  the  Tour  de  Sevigm',  the  'hotel  al    Paris,  the  chateau 


124  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

in  Provence,  were  household  words  ;  the  stately  and  pict- 
uresque figures  which  had  once  moved  there  were  treas- 
ured shapes  ;  while  the  unapproachable  tender  grace  and 
naivete,  the  keen  shrewdness  and  ripe  knowledge  of  the 
world — all  indeed  but  the  fervent,  devout  heart  which  the 
touch  of  moral  pitch  could  not  defile — were  in  that  gen- 
eration laboriously  and  affectedly  mimicked  in  the  mere- 
tricious correspondence  of  supercilious  critics,  arrogant 
men  of  letters,  and  statesmen  as  venal  as  they  were  pow- 
erful. 

Grand'rnere's  world  was  infinitely  wider,  fresher,  and 
more  wholesome  than  that  of  her  daughter-in-law.  Grand'- 
mere knew  and  eagerly  acknowledged  the  sweet  though 
strangely  siirrounded  flower  of  French  quality.  At  the 
same  time,  Grand'mere  paid  the  penalty  of  her  freer  range. 
She  did  not  see  so  clearly  as  Madame  Dupuy  did  within 
her  narrow  limits.  The  elder  woman  was  somewhat  mys- 
tified and  carried  away  by  the  homage  offered — not  to 
herself,  but  to  her  representative  country-woman.  And 
she,  in  her  turn,  began  to  descant  to  Yolande  on  Madame 
de  Sevigne.  She  talked  with  enthusiasm  of  the  bright, 
beautiful,  loving,  charitable,  pious  grandame,  who,  in  the 
midst  of  abounding  iniquity,  remained  faithful  at  every 
stage  of  her  long  life — true  wife,  fond  mother,  devoted 
friend;  who  retired  to  solitude,  and  prayed  in  lowly 
abasement,  who  succored  the  poor  with  her  own  gentle 
hands,  and  who,  in  running  from  all  the  stilted  glory  and 
stereotyped  gayety  among  which  her  lot  was  cast,  retired 
not  merely  to  her  hay-fields,  her  bouquets  of  roses,  and  her 
portraits  of  her  daughter,  but  to  sick-beds,  from  which 
direly  infectious  and  deadly  maladies  drove  craven  priests 
and  doctors,  where  she  nursed  the  bodies  and  ministered 
to  the  souls  of  suffering  humanity,  till  the  last  sufferer  who 
was  to  be  relieved  by  her  rose  from  bed,  and  saw  the 
honored,  aged  kinswoman  take  her  place  and  die  in  her 
stead.  Grand'mere  called  Madame  de  Sevigne  the  Gama- 
liel who  stood  between  the  Jews  and  the  Christians;  and, 
had  she  been  well  acquainted  with  English  history,  she 
might  have  called  her  heroine  the  John  Evelyn  who  formed 
the  link  between  the  Cavaliers  and  the  Puritans. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  125 


CHAPTER  XL 

LADY   EOLLE's   ADVANCES   TO   THE    METHODISTS. 

But  Lady  Rolle  had  not  buried  herself  in  the  country, 
even  in  the  pleasant  spring-time,  for  the  whim  of  ruraliz- 
ing with  an  old  Frenchwoman  whom  she  discovered  to  he 
a  bourgeoise  counterpart  of  Madame  de  Sevigne.  She  had 
come  for  a  much  more  serious  affair,  which  tasked  even 
her  energies — to  carry  the  election  of  her  second  son,  who 
was  opposed  by  one  of  the  new  men  just  then  creating  a 
scandal  by  quitting  the  aristocratic  ranks,  as  the  Fabian 
house  quitted  old  Rome.  Debouching  boldly  on  the  out- 
skirts of  the  people,  these  new  men  sought  to  inaugurate  a 
more  modest  and  more  magnanimous  form  of  government, 
and  entered  passionate  protests  against  the  policy,  com- 
mon in  its  glaring  selfishness,  of  Montagues,  Newcastle, 
Sandwiches,  Hollands,  Stanhopes,  and  Townshends — de- 
claiming loudly  against  the  gross  excesses  and  the  mean 
rapacity  of  the  governing  families. 

Lady  Rolle  was  a  woman  to  live  and  die  by  her  order. 
She  could  not  conceive  another  state  of  matters,  or  another 
set  of  sympathies ;  and  while  her  candidate  dawdled  and 
dozed  over  patterns  of  brocade  and  chintz,  and  shapes  of 
tea-cups  and  footstools,  without  animation  and  interest 
enough  to  attempt  more  than  the  vulgar  exposure  and 
trouble  of  his  nomination,  Lady  Rolle  drove  about  day 
and  night  in  her  laced  head,  her  velvet  hat,  her  diamond 
stomacher,  and  her  lutestring  train. 

"Never  show  face  without  your  colors,  my  wenches," 
she  would  advise  her  attendants,  affably ;  "so  you  would 
awe  the  people,  silence  sauciness,  and  win  the  day.  If 
I  had  stood  in  Queen  Jezebel's  Bhoes,  I,  too,  would  have 
tired  my  hair  and  rouged  my  cheeks.  But,  look,  thai  is 
what  beats  me  and  my  parade  hollow,"  she  would  end, 
candidly  pointing  to  Grand'mere,  with  her  silver  hair  and 
benign  smile,  her  scoured  and  darned  Lyons  silk.  "There 
goes  one  of  nature's  ladies — God  Almighty's  gentlewomen. 


]2G  TIIE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

He  makes  a  few  such  in  a  century,  and,  sinner  though  I 
am,  I  know  and  honor  them  when  I  see  them." 

Lady  Rolle  cajoled,  bullied,  bribed,  and  dispensed  her 
threats,  her  promises,  and  her  gifts.  Even  golden  guineas 
slid  into  every  convenient  aperture,  not  to  say  impartially, 
but  with  little  regard  to  expense. 

"It  is  a  dirty  world,"  she  assured  Mr.  Philip  Rolle,  in 
answer  to  his  remonstrances.  "  Keep  your  hands  clean  of 
it,  Philip,  if  you  will;  but  we  who  rule  by  main  force,  by 
our  mouldering  monuments,  crumbling  charters,  lands, 
moneys,  and  the  left-handed  grace  of  kings — we  must  dab 
our  fingers  in  the  dirt  to  clutch  our  rights,  or  let  them  go ; 
and  if  we  only  dab  our  fingers  deep  enough,  by  spending 
a  score  of  thousands  on  our  elections,  like  the  Fitzwillianis 
and  the  Chandoses,  aren't  we  as  proud  as  peacocks  of  our 
dirt  ?  Better  let  go  our  seignorial  rights  than  keep  them 
at  such  a  cost  ?  No,  sir,  your  cloth  don't  above  half  think 
any  thing  so  unearthly.  You  leave  that  and  other  vaga- 
ries to  my  grand-uncle,  the  venerable  archdeacon;  and  I 
warn  you  in  time  it  just  caused  the  poor  dear  old  man  to 
escape  being  made  a  bishop.  And  with  the  men  who  deny 
the  bishops — the  Methodists  whom  I've  heard  on  the  road 
to  Tyburn  as  I've  visited  the  French  prophets  in  Soho — I 
mean  to  try  every  thing  till  I  find  them  all  a-wanting.  If 
you  have  grown  mealy-mouthed  yourself,  Philij),  I'm  sorry  ; 
but  I  shan't  give  in  to  you.  You  are  my  cousin,  my  old 
friend,  and  spiritual  director  in  a  way :  I  don't  dispute  it ; 
but  I  snap  my  fingers  at  you  in  any  other  light ;  for  what 
on  earth  have  elections  got  to  do  with  church  services,  and 
sermons,  and  poor-boxes  '?  If  you  can  not  be  a  man  of  the 
world,  and  aid  me,  pray  mind  your  own  business,  sir.  I 
shall  fight  my  indifferent  son's  battles  with  the  weapons 
which  come  to  my  hand,  and  those  arc  coaxing,  coercion, 
corruption  if  you  please.  None  but  a  Rolle  shall  repre- 
sent Reedham  in  the  country's  parliament  while  there  is 
breath  in  my  body,  or  a  man  of  the  name  above-ground  to 
fill  the  seat," 

The  rector  fumed  and  fretted,  and  ate  out  his  stubborn, 
loyal  heart,  or  flung  it  down  lor  those  jays,  Lord  Rolle  and 
his  hrothor,  to  hold  their  heads  on  one  side,  strut  over,  and 
deride:  But  Mr.  Philip  Rolle  did  not  dream  of  forbidding 
his  wife,  and  Dolly,  and  Milly  to  give  their  company  and 


THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  127 

assistance  to  Lady  Rolle  in  her  close  canvass.  Ignorant 
innocents  like  them  could  know  and  understand  nothing 
of  political  purity,  civic  claims,  and  the  cowardlinesses  and 
basenesses  of  men. 

My  lady  would  have  taken  up  Yolande  Dupuy  also,  and 
traded  with  her  quaint  seriousness  and  simplicity,  and 
classic-like  beauty,  and  her  foreign  words  and  ways,  as  she 
traded  with  the  buxom,  rampant  rectory  girls  ;  but  happi- 
ly, or  unhappily,  an  instinct  rather  than  Madame  Dupuy's 
furious  face,  or  Yolande's  own  recoil,  arrested  the  propos- 
al which,  with  its  refusal,  would  have  served  betimes  to 
break  a  spell ;  for  Lady  Rolle  was  as  incapable  as  a  child 
of  brooking  contradiction,  and  Grand'more  would  as  soon 
have  sentenced  her  child  to  the  public  pillory  as  have  con- 
sented to  such  an  exposure. 

"  What !  send  a  young  girl  to  knot  ribbons,  embroider 
scarfs,  and  pin  them  on  parson  and  publican,  to  drink 
healths  and  be  toasted  back,  bandy  fairings,  wheedle,  im- 
portune ?  No,  not  to  have  transferred  the  triple  crown,  in 
figure,  to  the  wasted  brows  of  Jean  Calvin." 

"  But  la  !"  cried  Dolly  and  Milly,  with  crimson  cheeks 
and  flashing  eyes,  "  whatever  are  you  frighted  for  ?  We 
are  safe  when  we  are  in  my  lady's  good  company,  even 
though  we  be  followed  and  pulled  sleeves  for.  The  other 
side  can  do  no  more  to  trounce  us,  than  groan  at  our 
bravery.  Our  very  fellow,  Black  Jasper,  doesn't  turn  up 
the  whites  of  his  eyes  one  bit.  It  is  not  as  if  it  were  a  fire 
or  an  earthquake  ;  but,  indeed,  my  lady  tells  us  the  pretty 
women  up  in  London  have  caps  made  express  to  appear  in 
at  the  street  fires.  And  so  small  do  they  hold  the  earth- 
quakes, which  we  two  turned  slug-a-beds  for  each  time  our 
papa  read  about  them  in  the  news  prints,  that  a  mad  wag 
went  about  t'other  morning  rapping  like  thunder  with  all 
the  knockers, and  bawling  'Three  o'clock,  and  a  monstrous 
fine  earthquake  !'" 

The  ferment  extended  to  Sedge  Pond,  and  what  with 
ringing  of  bells,  galloping  to  and  fro  of  messengers,  water- 
ing of  horses  at  the  ale-house  troughs,  and  the  quenching 
of  men's  thirst  at  the  ale-house  barrels,  the  drowsy,  miry, 
surly  little  village  stirred  and  stretched  itself. 

"What  a  bruit!  Grand'mere,  can  any  thing  on  the 
earth  be  worth  all  this  when  the  question  is  not  of  the 


128  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

world's  jubilee?  Goes  it  well  with  creatures  who  have 
souls  to  be  saved  to  act  as  gensdarmes  about  estates  and 
chambers  ?  Parliaments  !  What  miracles  have  parlia- 
ments wrought  that  men  should  make  such  ado  about  their, 
own  miserable  voices  in  them?"  asked  Yolande,  with  a 
girl's  audacious,  vague  austerity. 

"  Listen  to  the  little  fool !"  cried  Grand'mere,  in  lively 
impatience.  "  This  melee  may  be  unworthy,  but  all  is 
worth  which  God  gives  man  or  woman  to  do,  and  among 
worthy  deeds  none  is  worthier  than  that  which  belongs  to 
the  father-land.  I  tell  you,  Yolande,  that  because  even 
good  women  are  often  sceptical  and  irreligious  on  the  sub- 
ject of  the  consciences  of  the  men  in  politics  and  the  govern- 
ment, the  mothers  and  wives  do  much  to  render  sons  and 
husbands  knaves  and  villains  to  the  country.  Ah !  women 
do  not  comprehend  politics  ;  government  is  not  their  prov- 
ince. But  to  help  in  honesty  of  view,  in  soundness  of  con- 
viction, and  uprightness  of  life  in  the  men — that  is  the 
province  of  the  women,  as  it  ought  to  be  their  pride. 
Hold !  the  women  will  weep  and  break  their  hearts  over 
the  men's  hardness,  insensibility,  and  contumaciousness 
toward  the  outward  constitution  of  a  church,  and  the  same 
women  will  be  callous  to  mock  at,  and  even  try  wickedly 
to  subvert,  the  men's  sincerity  to  the  Spirit  of  God  with- 
in them,  in  truth  and  devotion  to  their  country.  It  is  a 
case  of '  This  ought  ye  to  have  done,  and  not  to  have  left 
the  other  iindone.' " 

"  But  what  have  men  done  in  parliaments  ?"  asked  Yo- 
lande. 

"  They  have  done  all,  child — brought  the  freedom  to 
worship  God  and  to  live  at  peace  with  men,  and  have 
broken  the  rod  of  the  oppressor  both  in  Church  and  State. 
Learn  to  condemn  and  despise  nothing  but  sin,  my  little 
one,  far  less  the  most  sacred  and  the  least  selfish  call  to 
the  righteousness,  the  wisdom,  and  the  courage  of  the  men. 
The  sun  of  Ivry  will  shine  like  ten  suns  on  that  day — I  do 
not  say  when  no  more  fine  ladies  will  drive  their  chariots 
over  men's  heads  and  hearts  in  what  they  call  carrying 
the  elections — but  when  the  men  will  approach  solemnly, 
reverently,  earnestly,  to  give  their  votes,  as  though  they 
were  to  take  the  Holy  Sacrament  ;  and  when  the  women 
will  look  on  with  their  hearts  in  their  eyes,  and  pray  humbly 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  129 

the  while  that  the  men  may  not  be  time-servers,  double- 
dealers,  hypocrites." 

The  election  was  so  far  imperiled,  though  my  lady 
would  not  allow  it  to  be  whispered,  that  she  found  it  ad- 
visable to  address  herself  to  Squire  Gage,  who  was  out  of 
the  immediate  neighborhood,  and  had  no  direct  voice  in 
the  matter,  but  whose  influence — not  territorial  or  com- 
mercial, but  personal  and  moral — was  understood  to  be 
great. 

Lady  Rolle  wrote  what  she  called  one  of  her  scrawls, 
singularly  characteristic  hi  its  handwriting,  and  very  com- 
manding in  its  solicitation.  She  craved  permission  to  pay 
Squire  Gage  a  visit  at  the  Mall,  that  she  might  have  the 
privilege  of  inspecting  his  princely  charities  as  well  as 
transacting  a  little  business  with  him  ;  she  begged  him  to 
set  the  time  and  promised  that  his  time  would  be  hers, 
but  suggested  that  Tuesday,  at  three  o'clock  afternoon, 
would  suit  her  best. 

Squire  Gage  wrote  back  that  he  would  be  highly  hon- 
ored by  her  ladyship's  token  of  good  neighborhood,  and  by 
the  condescension  of  her  inspection  of  his  poor  premises; 
but  he  was  far  from  princely  in  his  housekeeping,  whether 
in  entertaining  strangers  or  aught  else.  And  because  he 
hesitated  to  entrap  her  ladyship's  goodness  under  false 
pretenses,  he  must  take  leave  to  inform  her,  lest  she  should 
be  incorrect  in  her  judgment,  that  none  of  his  property 
lay  in  Tynwald,  and  that  therefore  he  was  not  in  a  con- 
dition to  vote  for  her  son;  nay,  in  strict  honesty  he  must 
tell  her,  at  the  risk  even  of  losing  her  esteem,  that,  if  he 
had  been  qualified,  his  sentiments  would  have  constrained 
him  to  support  the  opposite  candidate,  Mr.  Weatherhead. 

"The  rude  old  Methodist  looks  upon  me  as  a  liar,  and 
says  as  much,  and  not  in  a  very  roundabout  fashion  either," 
commented  Lady  Rolle.  "I  shall  lie  no  more  to  him,  at 
any  rate  !" 

And  she  sat  down  and  indited  another  scrawl,  in  which 
she  simply  made  out,  in  the  name  of  her  son.  Lord  Rolle, 
a  gift  in  perpetuity,  without  charge  or  duty,  of  a  piece  of 
groundin  the  centre  of  Sedge  Pond,  with  Liberty  to  build 
thereon  a  Methodist  chapel  and  Methodisl  preacher's  house, 
such  as  could  not  be  had  for  love  or  money  nearer  than 
the  Mall. 

F  2 


130  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

The  paper  was  returned  by  Lady  Rolle's  private  mes- 
senger, with  the  words  "  Canceled  by  mutual  consent" 
written  at  the  end,  and  with  a  slip  of  paper  to  the  effect 
that  Squire  Gage  was  sorry  to  be  compelled  to  decline  her 
ladyship's  liberality,  but  if  he  would  not  sell  his  political 
conscience  for  his  own  sake,  surely  her  ladyship  would  not 
dishonor  him,  or  any  Gage  of  the  Mall,  by  supposing  that 
he  should  pretend  to  do  it  for  God's  sake. 

"What!  does  the  crazy  old  hunks  pretend  to  be  as 
pure  as  an  angel  ?"  cried  my  lady  in  a  rage.  "  Folk  used 
to  call  pretty  witty  Lucy  Nenthorn,  at  whose  feet  my 
Lord  Babington  laid  his  coronet,  a  divine  angel,  until  she 
took  it  into  her  quick  head  that  we  were  profane,  and 
would  have  us  call  her  a  miserable  sinner  instead,  and  then 
she  went  off,  like  Selina  Ferrars,  as  stark  staring  mad  as 
this  man  whom  she  wedded.  Well-a-day !  they  must 
have  made  a  rare  couple,  a  man  and  a  woman  like  the 
rich  young  man  in  the  parable — only  that  they  did  not  go 
away  sorrowful,  but  went  and  sold  all  that  they  had,  gave 
to  the  poor,  and  followed  their  Master  as  they  thought 
they  were  bid.  Had  they  their  price,  I  wonder?  Were 
they  never  sorrowful  after  that  sale?  I'll  be  bound  he 
would  swear — Never.  But  the  old  fellow  is  as  mad  as  St. 
Paul,  and  we  are  not  many  of  us  called  to  be  saints,  any 
more  than  angels.  What  do  you  say  to  it,  Grand'mere 
Dupuy?"  inquired  Lady  Rolle  in  the  Shottery  Cottage. 

"  I  say  that  we  are  called  to  a  higher  calling,  my  lady," 
answered  Grand'mere,  unexpectedly.  "  I  read  in  my  Bible, 
'  Be  ye  perfect  as  your  Father  which  is  in  heaven  is  per- 
fect.' " 

"  Ah  !  you  are  another  of  the  saints,"  exclaimed  Lady 
Rolle,  with  a  groan ;  "  and,  I  confess  to  you  frankly,  my 
dear  old  Granny,  that  very  likely  I  could  not  bear  you  and 
your  extravagant  goodness  either — though  I  was  once 
used  to  it  from  my  dear,  great,  guileless  old  archdeacon, 
but  that  was  an  age  agone — were  it  not  that  you  are  also 
French,  and  have  a  nice  flavor  of  that  saintly  woman  of 
the  world,  Do  Scvigne.  Squire  Gage  is  not  at  all  of  my 
sort,  however ;  and  I  shall  have  nothing  more  to  do  with 
him." 

Notwithstanding  this  assertion,  before  the  election  was 
over  Lady  Rolle  found  herself  in  danger  of  being  indebted 


TIIE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  131 

to  the  good  offices  of  Squire  Gage  without  the  opportunity 
of  repaying  them. 

A  disorderly  rabble  was  likely  to  be  at  Reedham  on 
the  day  of  the  poll,  vindicating  their  intuitive  apprehension 
for  their  champion,  and  doing  him  and  themselves  the 
greatest  disservice  in  their  power  by  resorting  to  violence 
against  the  castle  party,  and  abusing  their  constituents. 
Lady  Rolle,  forewarned,  could  of  course  have  procured  the 
presence  and  protection  of  a  detachment  of  soldiers  from 
the  next  garrison  town.  But  her  pride  revolted  at  the  ad- 
mission of  her  weakness  in  the  very  stronghold  of  the 
Rolles ;  her  native  courage  rose  single-handed  to  the  con- 
test. Like  Maria  Theresa,  she  was  minded  to  trust  to  the 
mere  sight  of  her,  their  liege  lady,  to  quell  all  disturbance. 
Neither  were  Lord  Rolle  and  his  brother  deficient  in 
valor,  and  its  better  part,  discretion.  It  seemed  to  be- 
long to  the  generation,  with  all  its  fearful  temptations, 
that  such  men  should  fear  nothing.  And  if  they  were 
pelted  with  dead  cats,  or  even  cut  by  stones,  it  would 
afford  a  little  relief  to  the  wearisome  chairing  and  feasting 
— not  an  agreeable  variety,  perhaps,  but  still  it  was  a 
change  on  the  programme.  And  if  the  brutal  rioters  should 
be  convicted  and  brought  to  justice — if  any  thing  like  a 
murder  had  come  to  be  committed,  and  any  thing  like  a 
hanging  of  the  wretches  took  place,  the  suffering  and  doom 
would,  of  course,  be  their  own  business  and  their  proper 
wages, but  there  would  be  a  little  interest  and  speculation 
for  the  witnesses.  In  the  mean  time,  the  Rolles  rode  with 
their  pencils  in  their  hands,  ready  to  sketch  any  good 
effect  of  bridge  or  ruin  which  they  might  catch,  their  dice- 
boxes  in  their  pockets,  so  that  they  might  throw  a  cast, 
and  thus  pass  away  an  interval. 

At  this  crisis  Squire  Gage  volunteered  a  courteous, 
earnest  assurance  to  Lady  Rolle  that  he  would  come  hound 
for  her  safety  and  comfort,  as  far  as  his  poor  means  could 
extend.  He  would  send  his  son  to  Reedham  on  the  day 
of  the  election,  to  exert  all  his  family  and  Methodist  in- 
terest to  keep  the  peace. 

Lady  Rolle  had  again  looked  in  on  Grand 'mere,  and  was 
sitting*  with  her  in  the  arbor  when  the  message  reached 
her 

"Now, I  say  that  Squire  Gage  is  ready  to  lie  like  the 


132  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

rest,  in  order  to  keep  himself,  his  son  and  heir,  and  his  low 
fanatical  body,  out  of  a  scrape,"  cried  Lady  Rolle  ;  "  and 
the  best  of  it  is,  what  will  you  bet  but  that  he  will  fail  us 
at  a  pinch  ?" 

"  I  bet  not,  my  lady,"  answered  Grand'rnere,  with  spirit ; 
"  but  I  have  so  little  fear  that  the  good  old  Squire  of  the 
Mall,  M.  Flechier's  friend  and  mine,  will  break  his  parole, 
that  I  engage  to  be  there  to  see  him  keep  it." 

"  Done,  my  dear  Goody,"  said  Lady  Rolle.  So  she  made 
it  a  bargain,  for  she  sought  to  swell  her  train  by  every  art 
and  element. 

But  Grand'mere  only  went  to  Reedham  in  a  family  party, 
with  Yolande  and  Monsieur,  and,  from  the  windows  of  a 
mercer  wTith  whom  the  silk-weavers  did  business,  she  saw 
what  took  place  in  a  quiet  way. 

Grand'mere  had  beheld  before  now  displays  of  popular 
feeling,  inconsiderate,  unprincipled,  dangerous,  brutal ;  but 
never  had  she  witnessed  any  thing  so  unblushingly  gross 
as  the  details  of  this  national  ceremony. 

There  were  the  men  in  smock-frocks  and  great-coats, 
and  the  women  in  rustic  hats,  torn  caps,  red  mantles,  green 
aprons,  all  jostling  each  other,  gesticulating,  reeling,  and 
rolling  in  the  mire,  with  their  banners,  colors,  and  blud- 
geons, shouting  till  they  Avere  hoarse,  blaspheming,  squall- 
ing, and  even  braying. 

On  the  outside  Avas  a  ragged  fringe  of  rioting  and  fight- 
ing soldiers  and  sailors  who  had  been  just  discharged, 
squalid  beggars,  and  the  base  scum  of  jails.  Then  there 
were  the  central  figures  of  the  rival  candidates,  and  the 
gentlemen  on  each  side  of  the  hustings  making  their 
speeches,  (with  the  uproar  outside  for  a  fitting  accompani- 
ment), swaggering,  waving  their  glasses,  laughing,  yawn- 
ing, dealing  each  other  ruffianly  blows,  and  exchanging  car- 
tels on  the  spot.  There  were  the  sheriff,  the  attorneys, 
and  the  clerks,  having  wigs,  bags,  and  writs  for  their 
proper  weapons,  pouncing  with  craft  and  quibbles,  but 
without  disguise,  on  the  voters,  and  plying  them  Avith  all 
sorts  of  cajoleries  and  bribes.  But  like  the  household  at 
the  Mall,  the  voter's  roll  included  the  blind,  the  lame,  the 
fatuous,  even  the  dead  among  its  members,  for  there  AArere 
not  AA-anting  brazen  perjurers,  Avho  Avere  caught  holding 
up  their  hands  and  sAvearing  to  names  the  old  OAvners  of 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  133 

which  were  gone  to  answer  to  the  roll-call  of  another  assem- 
bly. At  a  conspicuous  point  was  the  castle  chariot,  where 
my  Lady  Rolle  sat,  dominant  and  unmoved ;  and  when  a 
scowling  face  or  an  insolent  finger  approached  her  too 
closely,  she  faced  it  and  caused  it  to  shrink  back  before 
the  sheer  haughty  majesty  of  her  presence.  On  the  seat 
opposite  Lady  Rolle,  with  their  backs  to  the  horses,  were 
Dolly  and  Milly  Rolle,  fluttering  their  ribbons,  playing 
their  fans,  and  tittering ;  in  the  excitement  of  the  moment 
they  hailed  their  acquaintances  in  the  street  and  at  the 
windows  near  them  (overwhelming  Yolande  Dupuy  in  the 
process),  and  never  doubted  the  honor  and  the  profit  of  the 
exaltation  they  conferred.  They  had  no  more  thought  of 
the  mass  of  their  fellow-creatures  swarming  round  them 
than  of  the  flies  which  the  chariot  wheels  crushed  in  the 
dust.  They  were  more  insensible  than  Black  Jasper,  who 
glared  about  him  in  the  seat  with  Lady  Rolle's  Basque, 
to  whom  he  crept  for  fellowship  and  protection,  in  spite  of 
the  jealous,  sullen  temper  of  the  flute-playing,  half  savage 
mountaineer,  whom  neither  the  salons  of  Paris  nor  the 
gracious  wiles  of  Grand'mere  could  propitiate  and  tame. 

Grand'mere  shut  her  eyes  for  a  moment,  shocked  at  that 
Reedhani  election,  which  was  a  grim  and  a  grievous  piece 
of  satire  for  a  Christian  moralist  to  study  ;  not  the  less 
grim  and  grievous  that  it  was  lighted  up  by  streaks  of 
splendor  and  grotesqueness.  But  the  next  moment  Grand'- 
mere opened  her  eyes  again,  and  looked  abroad  resolutely, 
wistfully,  her  grey  eyes  growing  larger  and  larger,  more 
tolerant  and  more  pitiful. 

"  Galop,  time  !"  she  murmured  and  thought,  "  it  is  not 
just  to  judge  the  gait  by  it,  not  to  take  as  the  bouillon  the 
mere  boiling  over  of  the  pot.  The  pastor  is  there,  though 
I  see  him  not;  erect  as  he  is,  less  upright  men  bow  and 
bend  and  hide  him.  There  are  other  honest  men,  besides 
the  pastor  and  Squire  Gage,  in  the  province — oh  yes,  hun- 
dreds of  them,  whose  honesty  will  always  be  honesty,  and 
not  politeness,  as  it  too  often  is.  Yes,  and  their  industry 
is  labor,  never  intrigue.  But  they  strike  the  clods  with 
their  vices,  else  1  should  not  have  to  say  to  myself,  Go, 
old  Genevieve,  there  are  dozens  of  brave,  pure  .Methodists 
down  there  unperceived  in  the  mM'ee.  1 1: 1 1 1  !  the  vilest  sin- 
ner there  is  a  brother,  whom  a  true  .Methodist   would  own. 


134  THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

Did  I  not  say  that  the  haute  noblesse  have  their  virtues  also  ? 
They  all  love  Madame  de  Sevigne,  and  each  loves  the 
friend  of  his  heart  fervently  and  faithfully,  if  they  love 
not  each  other.  For,  alas !  they  say  these  poor  great  Rolles 
— my  lord  and  my  lady,  and  my  lord  and  my  lord's  broth- 
er— do  hate,  not  love  each  other,  though  they  hold  together 
when  the  common  cause  is  in  peril.  Ah !  well,  that  is 
something — the  skeleton  framework  of  regard,  perhaps. 
And  see,  Master  George  spoke  like  a  man  once  in  his  ad- 
dress, though  he  spoke  the  most  of  it  so  languidly,  like  a 
woman.  It  was — I  know  not  at  what,  but  he  looked  like 
a  man  and  a  gallant  noble  at  the  instant,  and  all  the  men 
on  both  sides  held  up  their  heads  and  hurrahed  at  the 
same  time.  That  was  magnanimous — that  was  fine — a 
redeeming  touch,  which  showed  that  they  were  not  quite 
apes  an4  satyrs.  Morbleu  !  probably  it  was  a  defiance  of 
us,  poor  dear  French,  in  politics,  though  not  in  fashions, 
and  an  allusion  to  the  French  frigate  on  the  slippery  deck 
of  which  the  sailor  brother  of  the  future  member  fell.  Did 
these  two  brothers  love  each  other  in  life,  I  wonder  ?  Fie, 
fie  !  Genevieve,  to  put  so  cruel  a  question.  Well  under- 
stood !  the  Rolles  are  not  vindictive ;  they  are  generous 
enemies  to  me  and  mine.  At  last,  and  on  the  whole,  one 
must  have  much  faith  to  meet  such  an  experience  as  this 
at  the  market  cross  at  Reedham.  I  am  afflicted  that  I 
brought  the  child ;  yet,  again,  to  ignore  the  wrong  is  not 
to  efface  it ;  far  better  to  think  of  curing  the  mortal  mal- 
ady. So  many  centuries  of  Christianity,  which  was  to 
make  the  world  free  indeed,  and  yet  to  be  no  nearer  noble 
patriots,  good  citizens  !  Misericorde  !  shall  it  not  be  better 
for  the  Greeks  and  the  Romans,  who  never  heard  the 
name  of  Christ,  than  for  the  French  and  the  English  ? 
What,  after  all  these  centuries,  no  higher  motives,  no 
sweeter  manners,  no  gentler  tastes !  But  it  is  necessary 
to  watch  and  pray,  that  we  maybe  able  to  tell  them  better 
things  at  Sedge  Pond,  to  cleanse  the  floors  of  the  ale-house, 
and  to  dethrone  the  beast  which  reigns  thci*e." 

Yolande  was  standing  by  the  side  of  Grand'mere,  star- 
ing aghast,  and  still  only  half  comprehending  what  she 
saw.  All  at  once  she  blenched,  flushed  up,  and  drew 
back  behind  her  protectress.  A  hoarser  murmur  and  a 
rougher  surge  were  rising  and   spreading  over  the  mob, 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  135 

and  Caleb  Gage  was  visible  all  at  once  on  foot,  conspicuous 
in  the  middle  of  it  from  his  velvet  coat,  shining  buttons, 
and  laced  hat.  He  was  alone  there,  so  far  as  his  class  and 
his  party  were  concerned,  and  should  the  tiger  humor 
which  lurks  in  every  riotous  mob  forget  the  merciful,  kindly 
charity  of  the  Mall,  the  squire's  son  would  be  in  greater 
danger  than  any  man  or  woman  present.  He  was  not  do- 
ing much,  only  turning  a  frank,  open  face  in  every  direc- 
tion, and  elbowing  his  way  here  and  there,  speaking  softly 
a  quieting  word  now  and  then,  and  testifying  how  fully 
he  trusted  his  neighbor. 

While  Caleb  sought,  by  means  so  simple  that  a  child 
could  have  used  them,  to  curb  the  excited  passions  and 
calm  the  troubled  spirits  around  him,  an  impulse  was  twice 
given  to  the  brooding  madness  and  crime  which  placed 
the  peace-maker  first  of  all  in  imminent  jeopardy.  His 
hat  was  knocked  off  by  one  of  the  rude  and  reckless  hands 
always  tingling  to  deal  the  initiatory  blow  in  a  fight — a 
fellow-hand  to  those  the  Gages  had  filled  liberally  in  their 
day  ;  and  a  watch-word  was  coined  and  circulated,  red-hot 
and  hissing  from  the  primitive  mint,  "  Trip  up  the  spy,  the 
furncoat !"  But  before  the  signal  could  be  followed,  and 
the  tumult  deepen  into  an  uproar — while  the  girl  whose 
heart  the  young  man  had  stolen  unawares  did  not  guess  by 
any  instinct  of  woman's  love  the  crisis  through  which 
they  were  passing,  and  while  Grand'mere  clasped  Yolande's 
hand  and  prayed  impetuously — Caleb  Gage's  blue^  eyes 
darted  glances  on  every  side  like  lightning,  till  they  fell  on 
welcome,  homely  features  which  he  knew ;  and  as  he 
laughed  in  the  forbidding  faces  of  the  raging  crew  who 
jostled  against  him,  he  challenged  his  man  loudly  and 
clearly : 

"You,  Toby,  I  know  you  wear  a  plaid  night-cap  below 
your  fur  cap,  for  I've  seen  it  many  a  night  when  we've 
given  you  lodging  at  the  Mall;  lend  a  hand  with  your 
beaver  here,  till  I  can  reach  the  mercer's." 

"  Loife  and  fortcn,  yes,  tneaster,  and  the  night-cap  t'orby," 
Toby  responded,  loyally. 

A'falsc  demagogue,  whose  breath  was  abuse  and  mockery, 
foreseeimj;  the  effect  of  the  good  office,  tried  to  prevent    it. 

"You  mean  vermin !"  he  assailed  the  grateful  Toby,  by 
trade  a  traveling  tailor:  "didn't  he  ask  you  to  say  your 


136  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

prayers  afore  he  granted  you  and  your  goose  a  night's 
lodging  ?" 

"  And  could  I  ask  him  a  better  thing  ?"  Caleb  appealed 
sharply  to  his  audience ;  "  unless  you,  masters  and  mis- 
tresses, are  all  infidels  together.  If  I  had  asked  him  to  say 
his  prayer  to  me,  or  eve-n  for  me,  Tap-room  Teddy  might 
have  had  some  cause  to  find  fault." 

There  came  a  half-doubtful  growl  of  acquiescence,  rising 
into  a  louder,  more  decided  growl  of  condemnation  of  the 
men  who  were  molesting  one  of  the  Gages  of  the  Mall, 
who,  although  they  had  the  misfortune  to  be  gentry,  were 
genuine  friends  of  the  people,  notwithstanding  that  they 
were  strait-laced,  psalm-singing  Methodists.  Let  every 
man  do  what  he  had  a  mind  to,  was  the  rough  and  ready 
gospel  of  the  Reedharu  election  crowd,  and  it  was  not  al- 
together un-English,  nor  altogether  untrue,  turbid  as  was 
its  source.     So  that  crisis  was  safely  got  over. 

Ten  minutes  later,  when  the  people  had  time  to  breathe 
again,  an  irregular  skirmish  of  throwing  filth  and  stones, 
possibly  more  offensive  than  formidable,  was  begun  by 
what  might  be  considered  the  marauders  and  skirmishers 
of  both  armies.  But  some  gentlemen  on  the  Rolles'  side 
were  rash  and  desperate  enough  to  fire  their  pistols  from 
a  window  of  the  inn,  wounding  a  guilty  ringleader  and  an 
innocent  baby  in  a  hapless  woman's  arms.  On  the  hit- 
ting of  the  baby  there  was  a  roar  from  the  crowd  like  that 
of  the  wind  in  a  hurricane  ;  and  a  rush  so  great  was  made 
toward  Lady  Rolle's  chariot,  that  it  swayed  from  side  to 
side  like  a  boat  on  the  waves.  The  spirited  horses  struck 
out  wildly  ;  Dolly  and  Milly  Rolle  were  smitten  with  sense- 
less consternation,  and  would  have  leaped  out,  to  certain 
destruction,  had  they  not  been  forcibly  held  back  by  friends 
without.  Black  Jasper  rolled  his  tongue  like  a  mad  dog, 
but  did  not  attempt  to  copy  his  mistresses'  example  ;  while 
his  comrade,  the  Basque,  half  opened  his  heavy  eyes  and 
mouth  with  a  faint  expression  of  gratification. 

Caleb  Gage,  active  and  strong,  fought  his  way  to  the  step 
of  the  chariot,  and  stood  between  Lady  Rolle  and  her  as- 
sailants, before  any  gentleman  could  spring  to  her  aid  from 
the  hustings. 

But  my  lady  rose  to  her  feet,  and  exposing  herself  to 
friends  and  foes,  turned  a  grandly  firm,  white  face  on  them 


THE    HUGUEX0T   FAMILY.  137 

both.  "  I  command  that  firing  to  cease  ;  I  shall  hold  that 
the  next  man  who  fires  aims  at  me.  Mob!  do  you  hear 
that  ?" 

"  Ay,  ay,  we  hear !"  burst,  as  if  irresistibly,  from  the  mass. 
"  You  may  be  a  Jezebel,  but  you  are  not  the  worst  of  your 
set,  and  they  shannot  make  a  scapegoat  of  you."  And  the 
fit  of  fury  ebbed  as  rapidly  as  it  had  flowed.  Then,  tak- 
ing advantage  of  its  fall,  the  state  of  the  poll  was  declared, 
and  the  Honorable  George  Rolle  elected  and  chaired  with- 
out farther  opposition. 

"  Ah  !  God  be  praised,  there  is  one  hero  !"  cried  Grand'- 
mere,  moved  beyond  control.  "  Shall  we  grudge  his  hero- 
ism and  disown  it  because  he  is  nothing  to  us?  We  are 
not  so  poor  and  miserable,  and  we  too  will  be  at  peace,  and 
claim  the  blessing  of  the  men  of  peace." 


CHAPTER  XII. 

THE  ROLLES  AT  THE  CASTLE. 

Lady  Rolle,  having  seen  her  son  securely  established  in 
his  hereditary  seat,  found  herself  in  urgent  want  of  a  fresh 
object  to  work  for,  or  a  new  cup  and  balls  to  play  with. 
In  the  dearth  of  more  exciting  employments,  she  became 
gradually  captivated  with  the  dreamy  foreign  graces  of  Yo- 
lande  Dupuy.  At  length  she  set  her  heart  on  having  the 
girl  in  her  own  hands,  to  mould  after  her  capricious  notions, 
and  to  show  about  wherever  she  went.  Such  patronage  of 
young  girls  was  then  the  fashion.  My  Lady  Burlington  and 
another  fine  lady  had  already  electrified  London  with  the 
attractions  of  the  Italian  girl  Violante,  and  with  their  fierce 
contentions  as  to  which  of  them  had  the  right  to  set  off  her 
fine  house  with  the  poor  spoiled  protege. 

Lady  Rolle  had  similar  inclinations  and  ambitions.  She 
would  supplement  her  own  ascendancy  over  the  great  world, 
and  amuse  her  own  jaded  sensations,  by  producing  the  dig- 
nified Huguenot  beauty,  and  by  watching  the  effect  she 
would  produce  on  the  men  and  women  who  spent  their 
days  in  seeking  for  some  new  thing,  but  ended  them  by  flip- 
pantly proclaiming  the  doleful  conclusion  of  Solomon,  that 


138  THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

there  was  nothing  new  under  the  sun,  with  the  addition 
that  neither  was  there  any  thing  high  or  holy,  pure  or  true. 
She  would  see  for  herself  what  effect  the  corruption  and  in- 
fidelity of  her  world  would  have  on  a  girl  apparently  so  un- 
worldly in  nature  and  nurture  as  Yolande,  and  how  far 
Grand'mere's  teaching  would  enable  her  devoted  pupil  to 
stand  the  test  of  temptation  ?  And  who  knows  but  such 
treatment  on  such  a  subject  would  end  in  developing  an- 
other unapproachable  Delany  or  De  Sevigne?  And  should 
this  be  the  result,  surely  society  and  posterity  would  owe 
gratitude  to  Lady  Rolle  for  having  brought  to  light,  and 
drawn  from  a  state  of  cloister-like  seclusion,  a  nature  so  rich 
and  so  calculated  to  shine  aud  to  aid  others. 

Lady  Rolle  had  a  craving  appetite  to  see  the  fruits  of  bit- 
ter knowledge.  But  along  with  this  vain,  tormenting  curi- 
osity, might  there  not  be  a  better  feeling,  a  yearning  of  the 
restless  spirit  for  rest,  a  desperate  impulse  to  recover  what 
had  been  lost  ? 

Proud  as  Lady  Rolle  was,  and  in  a  general  way  above 
disguise  and  subterfuge,  she  was  yet  forced  to  admit  the  ex- 
istence of  some  obstacles  to  her  will  in  the  pursuit  of  Yo- 
lande, and  also  to  acknowledge  some  obligation  to  overcome 
them  by  lawful  effort,  some  demand  for  stratagem  and  wa- 
riness in  her  advance  to  her  goal.  The  abduction  of  a  French 
Huguenot  girl,  for  the  girl's  own  good,  might  not  sound  a 
very  alarming  accusation  against  a  woman  of  her  rank. 
And  she  was  shielded  from  some  risks  by  her  position  as  a 
peeress.  But  she  was  too  wise  to  take  any  step  that  might 
lead  to  unnecessary  scandal.  Besides,  Lady  Rollc's  fondness 
for  Grand'mere,  extremely  fanciful  as  it  was  at  first  sight,  did 
not  prove  on  that  account  incapable  of  influencing  her.  So 
she  commenced  her  operations  with  wonderful  mildness 
and  moderation,  setting  herself  at  once  to  captivate  the 
occupants  of  the  Shottery  Cottage. 

One  individual  there,  however,  resisted  all  Lady  Rolle's 
superb  arts.  Grand'mere,  Monsieur,  Yolande,  and  even 
brusque  Priscille,  succumbed  one  after  another  in  a  greater 
or  less  degree.  Madame,  and  Madame  alone,  though  she 
saw  so  short  a  way  and  with  so  concentrated  a  light,  stood 
out,  and  declared  war  to  the  knife  against  her  powerful  and 
insidious  antagonist,  refusing  absolutely  to  touch  her  gifts. 
Grand'mere  contemplated  the  stanchness  of  her  daughter- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  139 

in-law  with  that  mixture  of  reprobation  and  respect  charac- 
teristic of  the  old  woman. 

Lady  Rolle  said  nothing  at  first  of  her  intention  of  car- 
rying off  Yolande  from  what  she  termed  the  living  burial 
of  a  village  life,  and  the  wretched  company  (always  except- 
ing Grand'mere)  of  the  refugee  family.  She  did  not  breathe 
a  whisper  of  her  notion  of  training  and  tutoring  the  girl  to 
become  a  young  woman  of  the  world.  The  great  lady  only 
languished  over  the  impossibility  of  transplanting  Grand'- 
mere to  the  castle,  and  bemoaned  the  form  and  circumstance 
of  her  own  high  station.  She  was  all  for  nature  herself,  but 
she  was  one  of  the  haute  noblesse,  and  must,  therefore,  sub- 
mit to  the  destiny  which  had  become  a  second  nature  to 
her.  But  her  life  was  many  a  day  a  burden  to  her  up  at 
the  castle.  Would  not  Grand'mere  allow  the  petite  to  help 
her  sometimes  with  her  shell-work  and  embroidery,  and 
keep  company  with  her  and  her  young  country  cousins 
Dolly  and  Milly  Rolle,  who  were  not  overwise,  and  who 
distressed  her  often  by  their  bouncing  ways,  but  who  meant 
no  harm,  and  were  virtuous  young  women,  to  whom  she  had 
a  mind  to  do  a  good  turn  for  the  sake  of  their  name  and 
her  old  friend  their  father  ?  But  indeed  to  please  herself 
she  would  far  liefer  do  a  good  turn  to  Yolandette.  And 
she  would  take  the  greatest  care  of  the  dear  innocent  child, 
who  would  be  as  safe  as  if  she  were  under  lock  and  key  at 
the  castle.  And  her  sons  were  men  of  honor,  who  would 
hold  their  mother's  protection  sacred  and  sure;  and  then, 
too,  they  had  a  huge  admiration  for  Madame  de  Sevigne, 
and  intended  a  brotherly  kindness  to  Yolande. 

Now  these  persuasions  of  Lady  Rolle,  aimed  as  they  were 
at  Grand'mere's  weakness,  had  their  due  effect.  Grand'- 
mere was  daring  from  the  absence  of  suspicion  rather  than 
timid  from  the  presence  of  caution.  She  tenaciously  held 
to  the  noble  dogma,  "To  the  pure  all  things  arc  pure." 
She  Avas  to  some  extent  mystified  and  bewildered  between 
the  different  customs  of  France  and  England.  She  loved 
the  customs  of  her  dear  France,  but  then  she  was  reason- 
able and  sensible,  and  was  willing  that  concessions  should 
be  made  to  the  standard  and  practices  of  the  country  which 
had  adopted  her,  and  in  which  her  descendants  would  be 
naturalized.  She  had  always  held  it  desirable  for  Yolande 
that  she  should  have  companions  of  her  own  age  and  con- 


140  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

dition,  and  had  already  promoted  her  grandchild's  familiar- 
ity with  the  rector's  daughters.  She  did  not  think  that 
great  people  who  could  be  so  kind  as  to  entertain  such  a 
just  preference  for  Yolande  could  be  very  wicked. 

It  was  from  no  servile  homage  to  rank,  then,  but  rather 
from  the  excess  of  faith  and  charity,  and  from  the  confusion 
of  conflicting  impressions,  that  Grand'mere  was  led  off  her 
feet  by  my  lady.  She  was  not  only  above  every  thing  mean 
and  sordid,  but  by  temperament  was  decidedly  i'oma?iesque, 
and  she  had  at  the  same  time  the  safeguard  of  having  all 
her  antecedents,  traditions,  and  tendencies  thoroughly  bour- 
geoise  and  Huguenot. 

As «,  climax,  there  was  the  furor  into  which  Grand'mere 
had  suffered  herself  to  be  worked  about  Madame  de  Se- 
vigen  so  that  she  actually  came  to  see  in  Lady  Rolle,  not  a 
woman  devoured  by  ambition,  and  living  in  pleasure  and  self- 
gratification,  at  once  unstable,  relentless,  and  fickle,  but  a  can- 
did tender-hearted  Madame  de  Sevigne,  who,  in  her  compul- 
sory worldliness  and  parched  thirsting  after  better  things, 
would  receive  an  innocent,  devout  young  girl  as  a  stream  in 
the  desert,  as  an  angel  of  light.  What  wonder  that  Grand'- 
mere, in  her  enthusiasm  and  her  tendency  to  self-sacrifice, 
authorized  Yolande's  going  to  the  castle. 

For  Monsieur,  he  promptly  enjoined  that  Yolande  should 
wait  on  the  great  lady  whenever  the  great  lady  wished  it ; 
and  in  France  a  father's  will  was  always  regarded  as  law. 

There  remained  then  only  poor  Madame  in  a  weak  mi- 
nority. She  was  violently  disgusted  at  the  intercourse  be- 
tween the  cottage  and  the  castle,  as  she  had  been  at  that 
between  the  cottage  and  the  rectory.  And  she  was  too 
much  of  a  Cassandra  to  do  any  thing  except  to  prophesy  in- 
evitable evil.  She  was  always  barking,  but  did  not  bite. 
Like  many  violent  women,  she  was  undone  by  her  own  vio- 
lence ;  for,  after  all,  she  exerted  less  rule  over  her  own  fam- 
ily than  most  meek-tempered,  quiet-spirited  women  do.  She 
had  no  talent  for  classifying  offenses,  or  for  tracing  their 
relative  consequences.  Rude  and  blustering,  she  rolled 
them  all  together,  and  hopelessly  massed  and  confounded 
them.  Her  daughter's  going  to  London  into  the  great 
world  might  have  opened  her  eyes  as  with  a  shock,  but  Yo- 
lande's going  a  mile's  distance  to  the  castle  was  but  another 
version  of  the  apostasy  of  her  being  permitted  to  visit  at  the 


TIIE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  141 

parsonage.  Madame  saw  in  both  the  same  danger  to  Yo- 
lande's  state  of  perfect  tutelage  and  to  her  French  Calvin- 
ism ;  and  nothing  farther. 

So  Lady  Rolle  succeeded  in  making  the  first  breach  in 
her  assault  on  the  stronghold  of  the  Dupuys. 

Yolande  went  up  to  the  castle  in  the  early  spring,  while 
the  surly  east  winds  were  nipping  the  blood  which  had  its 
source  in  hearts  that  had  been  accustomed  to  beat  full  and 
free  under  the  warm  southern  sun.  She  went  before  even 
the  primroses,  which  Grand'mere  herself  acknowledged 
were  the  color  and  shape  of  the  stars,  began  to  bud  in  yel- 
low lustre  in  the  miry  lanes.  Had  these  fresh  and  dewy 
primroses  been  conveyed  to  Covent  Garden — not  the  hon- 
est market,  but  the  glaring,  dishonest  threshold  of  the  foot- 
lights— they  would  not  have  undergone  so  great  a  transi- 
tion as  was  in  store  for  Yolande. 

It  is  hard  for  us,  in  these  days,  to  realize  the  extent  of 
the  change.  Times  are  altered,  the  tone  of  the  world  is 
modified,  and  over  the  old  hideous  heartlessness  and  in- 
fidelity, where  they  still  continue  to  exist,  a  decent  cloak  is 
drawn. 

It  was  not  that  poor  Yolande  became  a  scared  eye-wit- 
ness of  crimes.  The  boorish  folks  of  Sedge  Pond,  whose 
dull  imaginations  required  strong  figures  to  be  reflected  in 
their  stagnant  waters,  mumbled  of  ghastly  crimes  which 
had  been  committed  at  the  castle  of  the  Holies  ;  but  if  these 
sluggish  mediums  had  not  returned  enlarged  and  distorted 
images  of  the  facts,  Yolande  only  saw  life  at  the  castle  in 
its  normal  condition,  and  that  was  simply  bad. 

In  fine,  Yolande  was  removed  from  the  Shottery  Cottage, 
where  there  was  suffering  for  conscience'  sake,  involving  its 
degree  of  nobility,  and  what  remained  of  its  lofty  principle  ; 
where  every  body  "  made  the  amiable"  save  Madame,  and 
every  body  else  bore  with  Madame,  and  recognized  that  her 
feverish  fretting  and  gusts  of  passion  had  their  origin  in 
duty.  Even  in  its  outer  courts,  where  its  spirit  had  sus- 
tained the  greatest  eclipse,  the  Huguenot  family  retained 
the  lingering  stamp  of  much  that  was  honorable  and  excel- 
lent. Hut  Yolande  had  been  privileged  to  abide  in  the  in- 
ner court,  spirit  to  spirit  with  the  beautiful  nature  of  an  old 
Christian  gentlewoman,  whose  heart  had  been  mellowed, 
sobered,  and  rendered  sacred  by  age,  and  who  was  at  once 


142  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

high  and  humble,  wise  and  simple — yet  wonderfully  pene- 
trating, clear,  and  resolute,  as  well  as  large-minded. 

And  so  with  the  print  of  Grand'mere's  character  inpress- 
ed  upon  her,  and  Grandmere's  fragrance  hovering  about  her 
distinct  individuality,  and  promising  for  it  a  benign  summer 
and  autumn,  Yolande  went  up  to  the  castle,  sharing  in  the 
generous,  gentle  delusion  of  meeting  the  representative  of 
Madame  de  Sevigne.  She  was  something  wholly  fresh  and 
piquant  there.  And  she  thrilled  and  palpitated,  not  so 
much  like  a  young  candidate  of  forgotten  chivalry,  or  an  art- 
student  of  what  was  one  of  art's  seasons  of  enthrallment 
and  degradation,  as  like  a  neophyte  of  the  one  church  invis- 
ible, intrepid  in  the  sublime  anticipation  of  saving  souls  and 
in  the  charity  which  covers  a  multitude  of  sins.  In  the 
great  white  castle,  with  its  vast  front  and  its  outworks  of 
pillars,  she  encountered,  with  only  a  mile  of  park  between 
her  and  the  Shottery  Cottage,  the  great  castle  giants. 

We  must  hear  a  little  more  in  detail  what  Yolande  went 
up  and  met.  We  may  despair  of  quite  understanding  the 
position  ;  at  the  same  time,  we  ought  to  thank  God  that  we 
can  no  longer  breathe  so  unhallowed  an  atmosphere. 

Yolande  found  a  great,  splendid  house,  swarming  with 
idle  retainers  and  spoiled  servants,  where  there  was  neither 
fear  of  God  nor  devil,  though  there  was  in  it  a  poor,  trod- 
den-down  clergyman,  Mr.  Hoadley,  who,  as  domestic  chap- 
lain, read  prayers  and  preached  when  he  was  requested,  just 
as  he  would  cut  up  a  haunch  of  venison,  or  hold  a  hand  at 
piquet.  Cards  and  dice  were  not,  in  the  view  of  the  castle 
grandees,  the  mere  tickets  and  dominoes  with  which  Mon- 
sieur and  Grand'mere  would  wage  an  elaborate  Avar  in  or- 
der to  be  social,  and  to  entertain  each  other.  They  were  the 
promissory  notes  and  stakes  of  sums  great  and  small;  for 
gambling  Avas  the  one  common  interest  inside  the  castle,  as 
horseflesh  Avas  with  the  men,  and,  to  a  certain  extent,  with 
the  Avomen,  outside  the  castle.  No  rank  of  the  occupants, 
no  story  of  the  building  made  any  difference.  Cards  Averc 
the  main  object,  and  from  the  great  drawing-room  doAvn 
through  the  servants'  hall  to  the  scullery,  all  Avas  set  out  for 
play. 

Yolande  saw,  too,  the  most  senseless  waste  of  victuals, 
batches  of  bread,  blue  and  green  with  mould,  being  tossed 
into  the  red  gulfs  of  the  kitchen  fire.     And  what  Grand'- 


THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  143 

mere  would  have  called  "  the  poor  dear  innocent  pigs,"  were 
fed  on  roast  chicken  and  blanc-mangcr  •  while  Lord  Rolle 
was  in  such  chronic  distress  for  money,  that  each  rent-day 
his  agent  had  no  choice  but  to  distrain  for  rent  even  in  the 
saddest  circumstances. 

And  Yolande  saw  the  company  that  came  to  the  castle : 
magnificent  fine  ladies,  only  more  elaborate,  and  more  coun- 
tryfied  in  their  magnificence  than  my  lady ;  and  gentlemen 
of  repute,  less  finished  than  my  lady's  sons,  but  heartier  in 
their  coarseness.  And  unless  the  visits  chanced  to  be  in  the 
form  of  morning  call,  the  company  uniformly  fell  into  the 
family  ways  of  gross  eating,  hard  drinking,  and  high  play. 

The  conversation  at  the  castle  exhibited  in  perfection  a 
dilettantism  without  either  heart  or  soul,  a  half  real,  half 
feigned  foppishness  and  squeamishness,  a  fidgety,  conceited 
fondness  for  spurious  art,  and  such  vile  insinuations,  that  it 
was  happily  impossible  for  good  people  even  so  much  as  to 
comprehend  the  double-cntendres.  All  over  the  castle  such 
conversation  was  more  or  less  current,  down  even  to  Dolly 
and  Milly  Rolle,  wTho  attempted  to  harden  themselves  in  or- 
der not  to  blush  at  broad  inuendoes  or  wanton  insults,  and 
even  tried  to  retail  them  with  their  own  foolish  lips.  It  must 
be  understood,  however,  that  life  at  the  castle  had  gone  from 
bad  to  worse  since  the  rector's  youth,  and  that,  not  caring 
to  spend  much  of  his  time  there  in  later  days,  he  Avas  unin- 
formed of  the  extent  and  the  nature  of  the  degeneracy.  Had 
it  been  otherwise,  he  would  surely  not,  even  in  spite  of  his 
feudal  allegiance  and  by-gone  kindness  for  my  lady,  have 
taken  the  moths  to  the  candle,  and  placed  his  facile  daugh- 
ters in  the  sounding  halls  and  corridors. 

Yolande  could  not  discover,  listen  how  she  might,  in  all 
the  willful  trifling,  in  all  the  malignant  talk  misnamed  shrewd- 
ness, in  all  the  poor  faded  mimicry  of  the  naivete  of  Madame 
de  Sevigm',  that  any  man  or  woman  at  the  castle  believed 
in  any  thing,  or  trusted  in  any  body,  or  had  any  God  in  the 
wide  universe  but  his  or  her  own  pampered,  disappointed, 
pigmy  self.  None  of  them  could  look  backward  to  sweet 
wholesome  memories,  or  forward  to  brighter,  better  hopes, 
but  must  cleave  to  and  batten  in  their  fool's  paradise. 

Brought  up  in  the  strictest  school  of  discipline  and  duty, 
and  as  ardently  attached  to  Grand'mere  as  a  lover  to  his 
mistress,  Yolande  was  perplexed  beyond  measure  to  find  that 


144  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

the  great  Rolle  family  had  now  reached  that  pitch  of  repro- 
bateness  recorded  against  the  Romans  of  his  time  by  no 
less  a  judge  thau  St.  Paul  when  he  said  that  they  were 
"  without  natural  affection."  Lady  Rolle  had  brought  her- 
self to  look  on  her  son  and  heir,  Lord  Rolle,  who  had  been 
her  suckling  child,  as  her  rival  and  enemy ;  my  lord  regard- 
ed his  mother  sullenly  as  an  interloper  and  incubus  ;  and  each 
entertained  toward  the  other  jealous  suspicion  and  cruel 
hostility,  which  they  did  not  trouble  themselves  to  hide,  and 
which,  like  consuming  lava  streams,  were  continually  burst- 
ing through  the  icy  coating  of  their  ceremonious  politeness. 

As  to  the  frank  and  fond  kinship  of  brothers,  it  was  un- 
known at  the  castle.  The  Honorable  George  Rolle  bore  a 
bitter  spite  against  my  lord ;  while  he  returned  the  favor 
by  grudging  his  cadet  every  advantage  which  he  could  not 
prevent  him  from  obtaining,  and  by  repaying  himself  in 
pinching  George  so  far  as  he  dared  in  his  birthright,  and 
playing  him  false  whenever  an  opportunity  presented  itself. 
The  great  link  between  the  two  brothers  was  the  necessity 
for  combining  against  the  domineering  spirit  and  eccen- 
tricities of  their  mother.  What  their  cunning  selfishness 
told  them  was  a  benefit  to  both,  and  an  aid  to  their  common 
bent  in  luxurious  effeminacy  and  savage  insensibility,  they 
readily  enough  combined  to  gain  ;  but  there  was  no  sweet 
affection,  no  patience,  no  trace  of  real  esteem  or  self-denial 
in  their  relationship. 

In  theory,  Yolande  went  to  the  castle  to  lighten  the  great 
lady's  pomp,  strife,  and  weariness  by  faith,  love,  and  peace  ; 
to  nestle  near  her,  look  up  to  her,  and  wait  upon  her  with 
such  reverential  pity  and  tender  devotion  that  the  wasted 
heart  might  be  won  back  to  God,  and  to  good  dispositions 
and  good  works. 

But  in  reality  Yolande  went  there  to  help  Dolly  and  Mil- 
ly  Rolle  to  keep  my  lady  company.  She  was  seated  at  the 
foot  of  the  table  or  the  draughty  side  of  it,  and  helped  last 
at  dinner  and  supper,  along  with  Mr.  Iloadley  and  Dr.  Spiers, 
the  chaplain  and  the  physician.  She  was  expected  to  with- 
draw into  window  recesses  and  vestibules,  or  to  betake  her- 
self to  the  housekeeper's  room,  and  the  society  of  Mrs. 
Mann  and  Mrs.  Sally,  when  more  suitable  company  offered 
itself. 

Yolande  found  the  troops  of  servants  saucy  and  insolent ; 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  145 

they  lied  to  her,  and  they  attempted  to  filch  from  her  the 
few  precious  things  she  owned — such  as  Grand'mere's  minia- 
ture in  enamel,  and  one  of  those  doves  in  gold  which  the 
Huguenot  women  substituted  for  the  crosses  of  the  Roman 
Catholics.  This,  to  the  confounded,  grieved  girl,  who  had 
known  nothing  but  the  kind  scolding,  the  blunt  truthful- 
ness, and  the  loving  care  of  lynx-eyed  Priscille,  was  in  itself 
a  jDerplexity  and  a  pain. 

Mr.  Hoadley,  in  or  out  of  his  cassock,  and  Dr.  Spiers  in 
his  green  spectacles,  did  not  work  any  harm  to  Yolande, 
save  what  came  from  the  sight  of  the  troubles  and  hard- 
ships which  engrossed  them.  But  Dolly  and  Milly  Rolle 
were  now  wofully  changed  toward  her.  Their  capricious 
friendliness  to  her  had  become  coldness  and  dislike ;  and 
no  wonder,  for  they  were  mortally  jealous  of  Yolande's  join- 
ing them  as  a  companion  to  my  lady.  They  persecuted  her, 
stealthily  and  stingingly  ;  they  misconstrued  every  thing 
she  did,  every  early  walk  she  took  in  the  park,  every  lily  or 
carnation  she  sewed  in  my  lady's  embroidery,  every  psalm 
of  Marot's  she  sung  at  Lady  Rolle's  request  to  lull  her 
asleep.  The  very  details  of  Yolande's  unchanged  dress — 
the  long-waisted,  sage-colored  Lyons  silk,  and  the  cap,  which 
was  chiefly  a  bow  of  ribbon  above  the  roll  of  hair,  so  sober 
and  sedate  in  its  one  bit  of  bright  color — afforded  ground 
for  their  raillery.  The  sisters  winked  at  her,  whispered 
about  her,  and  spoke  of  her  in  gibing,  bitter,  speeches.  _  In- 
deed, they  were  rapidly  advancing  t$  plot  her  destruction, 
and  to  consummate  her  disgrace  and  expulsion. 

Lord  Rolle  and  his  brother  were  not  such  strangers  to  a 
gentleman's  code  of  honor,  worthlessly  elastic  as  it  was  then, 
as  not  to  hold  their  mother's  house  in  some  sort  a  sanctuary 
to  girls  like  the  Rolles  of  the  rectory  and  Yolande.  They 
only  startled  and  distressed  Yolande  by  calling  her  to  her 
face  "  little  Dupuy,"  and  saint  this  and  saint  that,  and  by 
attempting  to  hoax  her  as  egregiously  as  they  hoaxed  the 
Rolle  girls  on  the  last  court  "fashions.  Afterward  they 
would  laugh  inordinately  in  spite  of  their  habitual  languor, 
and  proclaim  the  girl's  credulity  in  every  company  when 
the  imposture  was  detected.  They  affronted  the  shy  French 
girl  by,  at  one  moment,  claiming  small  services  at  her  hand, 
and  by  carelessly  neglecting  to  pay  her  small  services  in 
return  at  the  next.    "They  horrified  her  by  asking  her  to 


146  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

remember  them  in  her  prayers,  and  by  affording  the  clear- 
est evidence  that  they  were  scoffing  at  all  prayer,  and  at 
the  great  Prayer  Hearer. 

So  there  remained  only  Lady  Rolle  to  atone  for  these  out- 
rages on  Yolande's  principles  and  feelings ;  but  that  unhap- 
py, infatuated  woman,  after  having  with  the  utmost  solici- 
tude enticed  and  decoyed  Grand'mere's  child  into  her  power 
with  some  faint  thought  of,  and  longing  after,  better  things, 
only  made  matters  worse.  In  her  country-house,  away 
from  such  distractions  as  she  clamored  for,  and  with  her  vices 
and  her  tyranny  goading  what  was  capricious  in  her,  her 
revengeful  excesses  broke  out  in  their  native  deformity. 

The  rectory  girls  could  look  on  at  my  lady's  gluttony  and 
its  appropriate  qualifications  of  doses  and  drops,  and  her 
furious  card-playing.  They  could  listen  to  her  conversation 
when  it  waxed  most  scurrilous.  Nay,  left  to  themselves,  they 
would  learn  to  fish  for  tidbits,  to  borrow  Mrs.  Sally's  drops 
in  order  to  comfort  their  own  oppressed  stomachs,  to  stake 
their  last  half-guinea  of  pocket-money,  and  to  withdraw  into 
retirement,  when  they  could  be  spared,  to  employ  their  time 
in  vain  attempts  at  concocting  the  washes  and  paints  of  a 
fine  lady.  They  could  even  harden  themselves  to  endure 
taunts  and  abuse,  when  Lady  Rolle,  who  with  all  her  knowl- 
edge and  high  breeding  was  more  ignorant  than  a  savage 
of  the  obligations  of  hospitality,  turned  upon  them  in  sheer 
weariness  and  frowardness.  They  could  think  it  all  made 
up  by  the  honor  of  appearing  in  public  as  Lady  Rolle's  kins- 
women, by  receiving  copies  of  the  fashions  from  her  maid, 
or  a  set  of  ribbons,  or  "a  head,"  or  a  habit,  from  her  scorn- 
ful prodigality. 

Yolande  Dupuy  bore  all  this  for  three  days  and  nights, 
and  on  the  fourth  morning  she  rose  before  it  was  break  of 
day  and  fled  back  to  the  Shottery  Cottage  for  the  life  of 
her  soul. 

She  appeared  like  a  ghost  in  Grand'mere's  room  as  the 
old  woman,  in  her  pelisse  d  capuchwi,  was  placidly  watch- 
ing her  morning  fire  in  a  braiser  on  a  tripod,  and  perhaps 
pensively  wondering  whether  her  child,  rising  to  the  splen- 
dor of  such  a  life  as  that  of  Marlcy  or  Chantilly,  was  at 
that  moment  donning  her  armor  and  unfurling  her  banner 
faithfully,  like  another  Pucelle ;  or  whether  she  was  read- 
ing her  Huguenot  lesson,  which  had  been  oflener  read  in  eel- 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  14V 

lavs  and  garrets,  in  prisons  and  marshes,  than  in  halls  and 
castles. 

"  Grand'mere,  take  me  into  shelter  again,"  Yolande  began 
to  implore  in  disjointed  petitions.  "  The  world  is  too  much 
for  me.  But  I  know  well  what  you  will  say  :  '  Judge  not, 
presumptuous  one  ;  are  there  not  seven  thousand  who  have 
not  bowed  the  knee  to  Baal!  And  how  will  the  good  salt 
the  earth,  if  they  dwell  for  their  own  profit  and  pleasure  in 
the  desert?'  There  are  no  retreats  for  the  Huguenots.  I 
know  it  well.  But  ma  mbre,  I  am  a  silly,  feeble  child,  and 
not  a  wise,  valiant  woman  ;  I  dare  not  longer  abide  in  Sod- 
om. Ah  !  pardon  me,  pardon  me,  I  did  not  mean  to  judge 
and  condemn.  Mamma  had  reason  to  fear  for  me.  If  it 
has  not  made  me  wicked,  it  has  tortured  me,  and  shaken 
my  faith  in  God  and  man.  It  is  necessary  that  I  say  this, 
and  then  I  will  be  deaf  and  dumb  ;  for  I  did  not  go  up 
among  the  strange  quality  at  the  castle,  who  are  good  to  you, 
and  who  thought  to  be  good  to  us,  to  be  a  spy  and  a  trait- 
ress in  the  camp.  But  what  will  you  ?  I  should  love  better 
to  be  the  dogs  of  the  gentlemen  than  of  the  dame  ;  for  the 
sacrilegous  men  can  be  more  just  than  the  great  lady, 
though,  alas  !  she  loathes  herself  above  all  in  the  world." 

"  I  beat  my  breast,  I  tear  my  grey  hairs,  I  die  with  shame 
for  my  folly  !"  And  Grand'mere  fell  back,  almost  suiting  the 
action  to  the  word.  "  Ilein  !  what  is  the  price  of  my  grey 
hairs,  that  I  should  put  them  in  the  panier?  Is  the  time 
come  when  the  child  shall  lead  the  lion,  and  the  lamb  put  its 
hand  on  the  cockatrice's  den,  without  mortal  injury  ?  What 
are  to  me  the  risks  and  the  errors  of  Madame  de  Sevigne"  ? 
Away  with  her!  she  is  at  home;  her  body  sleeps,  these 
fifty  years,  in  the  vault  of  her  chapel,  her  spirit  is  with  hev 
God.  And  it  is  for  her  phantom,  her  shadow,  that  I  expose 
my  little  daughter,  the  daughter  of  my  son.  I  have  been  a 
weak,  vain  old  sinner  to  venture  Yolande  where  I  could  not 
go  and  spy  the  land  for  her.  She  scorns  the  spies  in  her 
innocence;  but  there  are  righteous  spies,  as  there  are  right- 
eous executioners.  The  punishment  is  my  portion,  my  de- 
sert; let  me  only  suffer  it.  Grant,  good  Lord,  that  it  be  to 
me  alone  ;  as  for  this  sheep,  save  that  she  is  of  my  house, 
and  the  ewe  lamb  of  my  old  age,  and  hath  obeyed  me,  what 
hath  she  done?  And  the  fine  lady,  whose  impulses  v. 
not  all  ignoble  I  believe,  the  unhappy  woman  who  has  work- 


148  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

ed  nothing  but  mischief — shall  we  not  pray  for  her  also, 
that  there  may  be  room  found  for  her  repentance — we  who 
so  much  need  repentance  ourselves  ?" 

"  Grand'mere,"  said  Yolaude,  hanging  her  head  and  speak- 
ing below  her  breath,  "  why  is  it  that  the  men  and  the  wom- 
en for  whom  our  Saviour  died  are  left  to  believe  nothing, 
to  hope  for  nothing  and  care  for  nothing,  like  these  mock- 
ing gentlemen  and  that  poor  raging  lady  ?" 

"  It  is  a  mystery,"  answered  Grand'mere,  solemnly  and 
pitifully ;  "  and  it  is  the  more  awful  that  they  have  willful- 
ly and  desperately  shut  themselves  out.  But  the  hand  of 
the  Lord  can  burst  even  their  locks  and  bars,  and  show 
them  a  grand  contrast — the  twelve  gates  of  heaven,  which 
are  not  shut  either  by  day  or  by  night,  because  there  is 
no  night  there." 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

HIS  REVERENCE   MR.  HOADLEY   AND   HIS   HONOR   MR.  LUSH- 

INGTON. 

Yolande's  flight  from  the  castle  was  followed  by  no  do- 
mestic results  beyond  the  penitence  of  Grand'mere.  Mon- 
sieur was  at  the  time  absent  on  one  of  his  periodical  visits 
to  London  :  and  as  for  Madame,  she  did  not  deign  to  ac- 
knowledge the  return  of  the  wanderer  by  any  thing  farther 
than — 

"  Child,  you  are  come  back  ;  you  did  not  find  it  so  good 
to  be  wrapped  up  in  furs  and  fed  on  blan&manger  without 
the  blessing  of  the  Lord.  For  that  you  may  thank  your 
Huguenot  ancestors,  your  catechism,  your  Grand'mere  and 
me,  who  have  taught  you  better." 

Then  she  retired  into  her  closet  and  thanked  God  with 
passionate  fervor  for  her  daughter's  escape  from  the  snare 
of  the  fowler. 

Priscille  only  limped  grumblingly  after  Ma'mselle,  who  had 
come  back  as  white  as  a  jasmine  for  all  her  feasting.  What 
chiefly  vexed  her  now  that  Yolande  had  returned  was,  that 
the  clear-starched  neckerchiefs  and  aprons  she  had  got  up 
with  so  much  care  that  Ma'mselle  might  not  be  behind  the 
rectory  girls,  had  been  unused  and  wasted,  and  not  only 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  149 

that,  but  she  was  ready  to  go  bound  that  her  work  had  been 
lost,  or  leut  to  these  very  madams.  There  was  not  a  whis- 
per of  Ma'mselle's  having  been  plagued  out  of  her  life  by 
the  admiration  of  the  Mohocks  of  fine  gentlemen,  though 
Priscille  had  no  doubt  it  was  from  them"  that  Yolande  had 
run  away.  It  served  the  cocks  of  the  quality  right,  she 
thought,  to  have  their  combs  cut  a  bit.  Indeed  Priscille 
would  have  thought  herself  indemnified  for  her  trouble  if 
she  had  but  heard  the  fine  compliments  which  my  lord  and 
his  set  must  have  paid  Ma'mselle,  and  the  splendid  offers  of 
carriages  and  six,  and  marriages  in  Fleet  Street,  which  they 
must  have  been  driven  to  make  her.  She  would  then  have 
had  the  satisfaction  of  telling  the  girl  that  they  were  rank 
lies  and  base  plots.  And  although  she  could  not  tell  whence 
was  to  come  Ma'mselle's  share  in  the  nettle-soup  and  gilt 
chicken  that  day,  she  looked  straighter  forward  out  of  her 
near-set  eyes  than  she  had  lately  done,  and  thought,  without 
admitting  it  to  herself,  that  Madame  was  like  herself  again, 
and  would  not  any  longer  pine  away  in  her  brightness  and 
sweetness.  Having  now  recovered  her  little  bird,  to  incline 
its  head  and  trill  fitfully  in  its  pensive,  intensely-earnest 
youth,  among  the  ass's  pepper  and  spiked  lavender  of  her 
garden,  Priscille  felt  that  Grand'mere  would  live  twenty 
years  longer.  The  Shottery  Cottage  was  more  like  itself 
to  Priscille  again,  with  youth  in  all  its  inexperience  and  im- 
patience, going  about  finding  fault,  wondering  why  wrong 
existed,  and  when  it  would  be  righted,  and  indeed  making 
farther  wrong  by  its  rash  enthusiasm  and  half-frantic  efforts 
at  the  world's  reformation.  Gruff,  practical  Priscille  would 
do  just  as  she  had  done  before.  She  would  scold,  turn  into 
derision,  and  lay  up  and  cherish  in  her  heart  the  wayward- 
ness of  her  young  mistress.  And  so  she  resumed  the  charge 
of  Yolande's  little  wardrobe,  and  beseeched  and  bullied 
Grand'mere  for  the  daintiest  fripe  in  her  cupboards  for 
Ma'mselle's  bread. 

But  if  there  were  no  results  at  the  cottage,  there  certain- 
ly were  at  the  castle.  Even  before  my  lady,alittle  stunned 
with  incredulity  at  the  independence  and  ingratitude  of  her 
protegee,  had  swiftly  recovered  herself,  and  before  Lord 
Polle  and  the  honorable  George  had  looked  up  from  their 
study  of  bric-a-brac  and  heraldry,  basset  and  ombre,  two 
emissaries  arrived  at  the  Shottery  Cottage  to  learn  what 


150  TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

mischief  was  in  the  wind,  and  to  give  Mademoiselle  Dupuy 
and  her  friends  a  more  or  less  disinterested  hint  in  time. 

The  first-comer  was  my  lord's  chaplain,  Mr.  Iloadley,  who 
looked  np  a  quotation  or  a  learned  authority,  rode  a  Bpare 
hunter,  and  took  a  hand  in  a  round  game,  as  well  as  said 
grace  when  he  was  allowed,  and  read  the  service  on  a  rainy 
Sunday,  or  on  a  morning  or  evening  when  it  pleased  my 
lady  to  get  out  of  bed,  or  go  to  it,  with  the  blessing  of  the 
Church  upon  her  head.  When  Mr.  Hoadley  was  out  of  his 
cassock  he  was  no  more  like  a  clergyman  than  Lord  Rolle, 
and  lie  was  in  reality  what  the  dregs  of  his  private  con- 
science and  the  remains  of  public  decency  left  him.  He 
was  a  man  under  thirty  years  of  age,  was  dressed  in  a  shab- 
by brocade  coat,  with  shorts  and  rolled  stockings,  and  the 
ordinary  triangular  little  hat.  His  face,  which  was  clean 
shaven,  would  not  have  been  ill-looking,  if  it  had  only  been 
as  open  and  clear  as  it  was  soft  and  delicate.  He  entered 
the  women's  room  at  the  Shottery  Cottage,  with  a  fine  show 
of  conceit  and  affectation,  and  a  well  got-np  strut  and  ogle, 
after  having  himself  been  squinted  at  disparagingly  by 
Priscille,  all  the  way  from  the  garden  gate.  With  the  spas- 
modic effort  of  a  man  by  nature  shy,  and  accustomed  to  be 
put  down,  he  announced  that  he  was  come  to  wait  upon 
Mademoiselle  Dupuy,  and  pay  his  humble  respects  to  her 
and  any  of  her  family  who  might  be  at  home,  and  to  ask, 
in  the  name  of  all  that  was  prudent,  why  she  had  bolted 
from  my  lady's  gracious  protection. 

Goaded  out  of  her  self-conscious  reserve,  Yolande  answer- 
ed, "  I  have  my  reasons,  which  I  am  sure  you  could  not 
comprehend,  Mr.  Iloadley.  Pardon  me  ;  I  know  quite  well 
what  I  am  about.  Have  the  goodness  to  render  my  duty 
to  my  lady,  and  tell  her  that  I  will  always  do  what  she 
wishes  in  the  embroidery  and  the  psalms  here,  but  that  I 
will  never  return  to  the  castle." 

His  reverence  was  so  unclerical  as  to  whistle  a  bar  of 
"  Nancy  Dawson"  at  Yolande's  answer,  and  so  unmanly  as 
not  to  pay  the  smallest  heed  to  it. 

"  What  do  you  say  to  the  chit's  contumacy,  madam  ?" 
He  addressed  Yolande's  mother,  who  was  scowling  at  him 
with  a  fierceness,  compared  with  which  l'riscille's  squint  was 
mild  and  kindly. 

"  I  say  that  my  daughter  shall  not  return  to  the  habita- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  151 

tion  of  wickedness  and  idolatry,  unless  she  have  a  desire  to 
make  a  holy  triad  with  Mesdames  Delilah  and  Jezebel,"  re- 
turned Madame,  with  the  air  of  having  triumphantly  dis- 
posed of  her  adversary. 

"Marry,  come  up  !"  exclaimed  the  self-constituted  ambas- 
sador, by  no  means  discomfited  by  the  attack,  effeminate  and 
irritable  though  he  was.  Madame's  passion,  as  was  its 
wont,  had  outshot  its  mark  and  rebounded  with  the  baffled 
absurdity  of  a  spent  ball.  "  Mademoiselle  was  so  obliging 
as  to  tell  me  that  I  do  not  comprehend  the  mighty  offense  ; 
and  truly  I  do  not.  I  am  such  a  poor  creature  in  my  good 
nature  that  I  could  not  help  looking  in  upon  you  to  warn 
you  that  if  a  nest  of  foreigners  persist  in  being  humorsorne 
to  my  worshipful  patrons,  they  may  find  themselves  turned 
adrift  without  being  fledged  ;  that  is  all.  And  methought 
you  French  were  more  attentive  to  the  opinions  of  your 
priests,  Catholic  and  Protestant,  than  our  English  are  to 
us." 

With  that  Grand'mere  rose,  and  with  all  the  dignity  of 
her  years  and  experience,  courtesied  to  the  young  man  in  such 
a  manner  as  forced  him  to  rise  up  from  where  he  had  been 
lolling  upon  the  settee,  to  make  her  a  sprawling  bow  in  re- 
turn. 

"  Yes,"  said  Grand'mere,  "  we  honor  our  pastors,  and  that 
is  well,  for  they  are  the  shepherds  and  we  the  sheep  ;  and  it 
is  true  that  our  pastors  have  not  failed  in  following  the  Good 
Shepherd.  Monsieur  must  at  least  have  heard  that  our  pas- 
tors have  died  with  their  sheep,  and  have  sealed  their  'I be- 
lieve' with  their  blood.  But,  Yolande,  why  did  you  not  tell 
us  that  Monsieur  was  a  priest  ?  How  good  it  is  of  Mon- 
sieur to  come  out  after  a  little  strange  lamb  as  he  has  done. 
Philippine,  there  is  a  sleeve  of  the  coat  of  a  true  pastor. 
Not  true,  say  you  ?  Can  you  not  see  it,  my  love,  although 
it  is  not  the  wing  of  a  Geneva  cloak." 

"  Eh  V"  questioned  Philippine,  gloomily.  "  In  zflandrin, 
a  damoiseau?  Believe  it  not,  ma  m&rt  ;  there  is  a  serpent 
hid  under  the  rock." 

"  Never  mind  her,  Monsieur,"  explained  Grand'mere,  plac- 
idly, "  she  is  honorable  to  the  tips  of  her  fingers  ;  and  if  she 
can  not  sec  the  comparison  she  will  nut  say  she  sees  it,  and 
so  she  scolds,  but  her  scolding  is  wholesome  as  the  bracing 
wind.     It  is  for  me  to  explain  and  thank  you,  Monsieur  my 


152  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

pastor,  when  we  can  offer  you  no  recompense,  for  Yoland- 
ette  is  nobody — a  rude  lamb  who  bounds  to  her  dam,  shak- 
ing her  tail  and  bleating  pitifully.  Ah !  my  young  pastor, 
Yolande  is  but  a  silly  lamb,  only  wise  in  knowing  that  in 
her  simplicity  and  weakness  she  might  stray  quite  out  of 
the  fold.  She  is  not,  like  you,  a  consecrated,  ordained 
young  servant  of  God,  to  resist  and  rebuke  evil  and  dwell 
among  it  unscathed;  and  so  she  beats  a  retreat,  and  lets 
her  just  fears  chase  her  out  of  that  Vanity  Fair  of  which 
your  great  English  Fenelon,  Bunyan,  has  written  so  well. 
Is  it  not  so,  Monsieur  ?  And  are  you  not  proud  of  your  Pil- 
grim ?  " 

Mr.  Hoadley  stared  at  Grand'mere,  his  hollow  black  eyes 
wide  and  his  mouth  open. 

"  Consider  what  unpardonable  wrong  I  should  do,"con- 
tinued  Grand'mere,  "  what  giddiness  and  folly  an  old  wom- 
an of  fourscore  years  would  be  guilty  of,  if  I  sent  her  alone 
with  her  roll  back  to  the  Vanity  Fair  from  which  her  ances- 
tors a  century  ago  fought  their  way  in  blood  and  fire.  Con- 
sider it,  my  generous  young  pastor,  you  who  had  some  care 
for  the  strange  lamb.  I  am  sure  that  you  will  be  glad  the 
scared  little  creature  had  the  discretion  left  to  take  oppor- 
tunity by  the  forelock  and  leap  the  city  wall,  and  that  you 
will  no  longer  seek  to  catch  her  and  carry  her  back." 

"Sure,  you  mock  me,  madam,"  Mr.  Hoadley  stam- 
mered. 

"Monsieur  le  Pasteur!"  exclaimed  Grand'mere,  in  unmis- 
takable surprise  and  pain,  and  for  the  first  time  taking  a 
step  back  from  the  visitor.  •• 

"  Then  what  do  you  take  me  for?"  he  inquired  hastily. 

"  For  a  young  Timothy,  please  God,"  declared  Grand'- 
mere, wistfully ;  and  then  she  added,  in  a  lower  tone  and 
with  exquisite  tenderness,  "  Had  he  not  his  youth,  which  he 
was  to  permit  no  man  to  despise  ?  Ah  !  that  had  been  a 
difficult  charge  had  he  not  been  the  scholar  of  an  inspired 
sago.  He  had  his  infirmities  of  body,  too,  and  I  fear  that 
you  suffer  also,  my  son." 

"I  suffer  in  my  soul  and  conscience," cried  the  young 
man  with  trembling,  passionate  lips.  "  I  am  no  such  vile 
hypocrite  as  to  lend  myself  to  an  act  of  imposture.  Made- 
moiselle here  must  have  told  you  that  I  am  a  miserable 
wretch,  a  priest  all  but  forsworn  ;  and  wherefore  do  you 


THE    nUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  153 

thus  convict  and  crush  me  with  the  shame  of  a  false  charac- 
ter?" 

"It  rests  with  you  if  it  be  false,"  remonstrated  Grand'- 
rnere,  gently.  "  Go,  you  came  not  to  me  with  a  false  pur- 
pose," she  argued,  with  penetrating  charity  in  her  motherly 
grey  eyes. 

"  No,  upon  my  life  !"  he  said,  eagerly  confirming  her  as- 
sertion. "  I  had  an  honest  thought  of  doing  a  good  turn  to 
the  modest  Mademoiselle,  who  is  very  different  from  the 
foreign  gentry  I  have  known  at  the  castle.  God  help  me,  for 
I  might  have  seen  farther.  But  I  say  now  you  are  perfectly 
right,  Madame.  Keep  your  innocent  maiden  out  of  the  gar- 
ish light  yonder,  out  of  the  awful  selfishness  and  desperation, 
though  you  should  have  to  lock  her  up  with  ten  locks  and 
keys,  and  even  though  my  lady  should  turn  you  out  of 
house  and  hold.  She  is  a  bountiful  patroness,  but  her  '  ten- 
der mercies  are  cruel,'  "  he  ended,  with  a  spasm  on  his 
white  face,  as  he  took  up  his  little  hat. 

But  Grand'mere,  by  her  sympatheic  words  and  soft  ques- 
tions, constrained  him  to  sit  down  again,  and  caused  him  to 
cover  his  face  with  his  hands,  and  to  betray  his  black  eyes 
moist  as  well  as  hollow  when  he  removed  his  lingers.  lie 
kissed  Grand'mere's  hand  ;  the  wonder  was  that  he  did  not 
fall  on  his  knees  before  her. 

Mr.  Iloadley's  greatest  sin  was  that  he  was  a  moral  cow- 
ard ;  and  he  was  no  worse  than  his  class,  except  that  such 
cowardice  in  a  man  who  held  his  office  was  more  degrading 
than  in  any  other.  His  life  had  been  a  hard  and  corrupting 
one,  and  there  was  even  some  room  for  marvel  in  the  fact 
that  he  had  been  saved  from  utter  destruction  and  down- 
right infidelity.  A  clever  but  weakly  excitable  man,  he  was 
very  ready  to  receive  impressions  and  take  on  hues  from  the 
men  and  women  around  him.  Curbed  and  generally  kept 
down,  on  the  smallest  encouragement  he  fell  naturally  into 
the  noisy  candor  of  the  period.  He  reproached  himself  in 
presence  of  the  three  women,  two  of  whom  had  never  seen 
his  face  before;  he  confessed  his  errors;  and  he  told  his 
history. 

But  after  all  it  was  only  to  one  benevolent,  godly  old 
women — reverent  in  her  age,  godliness,  and  benevolence — 
that  Mr.  Hoadley  spoke.  Madame  Dupuy  did  not  under- 
stand more  than  one  out  of  a  dozen  words  lie  said,  so  di>- 

<;  2 


154  TIIE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY. 

missing  him  from  her  thoughts  she  wove  her  lace  and  re- 
turned to  her  habitual  meditated  refrain  on  the  sorrows  of 
the  Huguenots  and  the  hardened  worldliuess  of  Monsieur. 
Yolande,  after  Mr.  Hoadley's  first  personal  allusions  were 
made,  slipped  out  of  the  room,  and  took  refuge  with  grum- 
bling Priscille,  feeling  no  regret  for  the  loss  of  a  tale  which 
she  was  tempted  to  undervalue.  Pity  is  akin  to  scorn  as 
well  as  to  another  quality  ;  and  Mr.  Hoadley  was  too  men- 
dacious in  soliciting  pity,  and  too  much  occupied  with  his 
own  troubles,  to  attract  either  light  or  lofty-hearted  girls. 
Only  Grand'mcre  listened  to  his  narrative  with  unwearied 
patience,  relieved  by  occasional  pinches  of  Spanish  snuff. 
In  meeting  his  avowals,  she  guarded  his  self-respect  more 
jealously  than  he  himself  did,  and  soothed  his  hurt  feelings 
and  wounded  vanity  while  she  faithfully  probed  his  con- 
science and  enjoined  amendment  at  any  cost. 

Mr.  Hoadley,  in  place  of  being  related  to  the  famous 
bishop  of  the  name,  was  the  son  of  a  poor  clergyman  who 
had  barely  managed  to  educate  his  son  for  the  Church.  Just 
as  his  university  career  was  ended  and  he  had  taken  orders, 
his  father  died,  leaving  a  widow  dependent  on  her  son's 
exertions.  There  were  but  three  fields  open  for  him — to 
starve  in  a  Grub  Street  garret,  to  be  an  usher  in  a  school, 
or  a  chaplain  in  a  great  family.  Mr.  Hoadley  chose  the 
latter,  as  affording  most  remuneration  for  the  present,  and 
the  greatest  hope  of  preferment  for  the  future.  When  he 
had  subjected  himself  to  this  bondage,  and  lived  long  enough 
in  it  not  only  for  the  iron  to  enter  his  soul,  but  to  become 
comparatively  disqualified  for  any  other  mode  of  life,  his 
mother,  whose  comfort  had  influenced  him  in  his  choice, 
died  and  left  him  alone  in  the  world.  He  Avas  neither  a  sot 
nor  a  confirmed  gambler ;  he  was  a  passive  witness  of  his 
master's  delinquencies,  but  not  yet  an  active  promoter  of 
them.  This  was  the  most  favorable  account  which  could 
be  given  of  him  ;  all  his  higher  aspirations,  his  purer  hopes, 
had  shrunk  and  withered,  and  were  near  to  perishing,  when 
he  encountered  Grand'mere. 

"I  say  nothing  of  the  glory  of  God  and  the  usefulness  to 
man  of  your  choice,  my  pastor  and  son,"  said  Grand'mere, 
with  her  usual  large  and  merciful  allowances,  "because  you 
say  you  did  it  to  provide  for  your  mother ;  and  is  it  not  said 
that  he  who  providcth  not  for  his  own  house  is  worse  than 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  155 

an  infidel?  But  in  the  name  of  God  what  hinders  you  now 
from  leaving  that  unhappy  castle,  and  shaking  the  dust  from 
off  your  feet  against  it  ?" 

Grand'mere  paused,  but  getting  no  reply  she  proceeded: 
"  The  pastors  of  the  Huguenots  quitted  their  father-land  and 
the  scenes  of  their  youth,  they  broke  the  dearest  ties  and 
wandered  abroad  to  struggle  for  daily  bread  under  a  foreign 
sky;  or  they  stayed  and  ministered  in  their  own  France, 
and  were  imprisoned,  fined,  led  to  the  halter,  or  shot  in  the 
market-place.  Ah !  Monsieur,  if  it  is  great  and  noble  in 
any  man,  assuredly  it  is  the  prerogative  of  the  priest  to  be 
great  in  suffering,  that  he  may  help  the  people — to  descend 
into  the  pit  himself,  if  so  be  he  may  rescue  one  of  them." 

"But  I  am  a  poor,  sneaking,  despicable  fellow,"  lamented 
Mr.  Hoadley.  "  I  am  not  like  your  stern  and  saintly  Hugue- 
not pastors,  reared  in  the  wilds  to  the  rattle  of  the  dragon- 
nades  I  read  of  when  a  boy.  Would  to  God  I  were  a  boy 
ao-ain,  madanie,  to  becrin  life  anew  !  But  I  have  lain  in  the 
lap  of  luxury,  and  am  as  full  of  disgusts  and  aversions  as 
Rolle,  and  as  full  of  vapors  and  nerves  as  my  lady.  I'll  lay 
you  a  bet  my  mind  is  going.  I  could  not  study  an  hour  on 
a  stretch  for  a  pension.  Certainly  my  health  is  broken ;  I 
had  an  attack  of  ascue  in  the  fall,  and  at  intervals  I  shake 
and  sweat  by  turns  to  this  hour. 

Grand'mere  looked  into  the  worn  face,  and  some  tears  fell 
quietly  from  her  old  eyes. 

"I  dare  not  go  up  to  London  to  rot  in  the  Bench  or  the 
Marshalsea,  or  fill  a  cell  in  Bedlam.  I  am  not  free  from  scots 
as  it  is,  and  the  Reedham  Jail  or  a  neighboring  ditch  may 
serve  my  turn.  I  have  made  my  bed,  and  I  must  lie  upon 
it;  but  is  there  no  hope  here,  dearest  madarae?  Is  there 
no  atonement  for  such  a  caitiff  as  I  am  ?" 

Grand'mere  clasped  the  young  pastor's  thin  hands,  kissed 
him  on  the  forehead,  and  told  him  of  hundreds  and  thou- 
sands of  her  persuasion  in  France  whom  De  Missy,  Bourdil- 
lon,  above  all  Saurin,had  reproached  and  condemned  for  not 
coming  out  of  the  country,  proclaiming  their  creed,  and 
casting  in  their  lot  with  the  exiles.  But  for  herself — slit- 
did  not  know — she  was  a  simple  old  woman,  only  she  trust- 
ed that  her  God  would  not  break  the  bruised  reed,  nor 
quench  the  smoking  flax.  She  had  read  of  lifting  up  the 
hands    which    hang    down,  and    strengthening   the    feeble 


156  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

knees.  She  thought  if  a  situation  were  not  morally  wrong 
in  itself,  the  wrong  in  it  belonged  chiefly,  if  not  entirely, 
to  the  wrong-doer.  Great  loss  might  be  suffered — greater 
in  the  main  and  in  the  end  than  any  loss  which  could  not 
be  contemplated  or  consented  to,  in  abandoning  the  situa- 
tion ;  but  she  could  never,  never  think  it  would  be  perdition. 
Salvation  might  be  as  by  fire  to  such  as  escaped  from  dan- 
gers like  these,  but  she  fully  believed  it  would  be  salvation. 
Truly,  there  was  work  for  a  pastor  in  the  castle ;  and  if  he 
wrestled  and  resisted,  he  might  do  something  to  bear  a  good 
testimony,  and  to  stem  the  tide  of  evil.  But  if  he  were  dis- 
missed ?  Ah !  well,  perhaps  that  would  be  the  best  thing 
that  could  happen  him,  and  the  Lord  would  be  his  provider. 
She  counseled  him  to  consult  the  pastor  of  Sedge  Pond,  and 
to  be  guided  by  him,  his  superior  according  to  the  govern- 
ment of  his  Church,  notwithstanding  that  the  young  man 
shrank  from  Mr.  Philip's  searching  scrutiny  and  severe  repri- 
mand.   Finally,  Mr.  Hoadley  and  Grand'mere  parted  friends. 

Thus  it  came  about  that  Mr.  Hoadley  was  constantly  drop- 
ping into  the  Shottery  Cottage,  to  be  entertained  with  a  lit- 
tle chocolate  and  an  unlimited  amount  of  succory  water. 
Being  a  very  excitable  man,  quick  at  borrowing  and  throw- 
ing back  the  characters  and  tastes  of  the  company  that  sur- 
rounded him,  he  came  to  discover  that  Grand'mere's  child, 
who  hardly  looked  at  him,  and  was  very  scaut  in  her  kind- 
ness to  him,  was  not  only  fair,  but  "  good,  and  true,  and 
wise,"  a  genuine  descendant  of  Grand'mere's,  and  fit  to  be 
coveted  for  her  own  sake,  as  well  as  for  that  of  her  venera- 
ble kinswoman. 

Between  Mr.  Hoadley  and  the  next  visitor  at  the  Shottery 
Cottage  there  was  a  great  difference,  both  in  the  original 
constitution  of  the  men  and  in  their  social  position.  The 
second  visitor  did  not  wear  the  coat  of  a  gentleman,  and  ho 
stood  behind  Lord  Rolle  at  table,  in  place  of  sitting  at  the 
foot  of  it.  But  it  was  a  grand  coat  which  he  wore,  and  an 
important  station  which  he  occupied.  Regarded  as  "his 
honor"  at  Sedge  Pond,  he  was  condescending  to  the  farmers 
and  small  clergy  in  the  vicinity.  He  was  a  man  of  more 
substance  and  consideration  than  the  poor  chaplain;  and 
while  Lord  Rolle  would  address  the  latter  as  Parson  Hoad- 
ley, or  by  any  other  idle,  insolent  name  which  came  to  hand, 
he  never  addressed  his  butler  by  any  term  more  disrespect- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  157 

ful  than  "  my  good  fellow."  Sometimes,  in  the  height  of 
urbanity  and  affectation,  ho  would  even  preface  a  request 
with  "  my  child."  It  was  said  that  my  lord  deigned  on 
occasions  to  borrow  gold  guineas  from  Mr.  Lushington,  and 
to  accomodate  himself  with  Mr.  Lushington's  name  on  pa- 
per. Perhaps  Mr.  Lushington  was,  on  the  whole,  the  most 
respectable  institution  at  the  castle,  for  he  was  a  man  verg- 
ing on  sixty,  and  had  served  my  loi'd's  father.  Nay,  he  had 
been  born  in  the  Holies'  service,  as  his  father  had  been 
before  him  ;  and  in  the  midst  of  the  wanton  waste  and  j til- 
lage in  high  places,  he  did  what  he  could  to  preserve  the 
honor  of  the  family,  and  to  look  after  their  interest  before 
his  own.  He  was  a  portly  man,  who  set  oifhis  lace,  the  scar- 
let of  his  livery,  and  his  silk  stockings,  and  wove  his  cauli- 
flower wig  when  he  went  abroad.  A  portly  man  and  a  pur- 
sy, with  around  snub  nose,  somewhat  copper-colored,  sharp 
twinkling  eyes,  fat  cheeks,  and  a  polished  ball  of  a  chin  ;  a 
man  bristling  over  with  prejudices,  and  with  choler  if  these 
were  assailed.  Little  as  they  deserved  it,  he  had  an  immense 
respect  for  his  family  ;  he  called  them  his,  as  if  he  had  the  on- 
erous task  and  the  great  misfortune  to  be  their  progenitor. 
To  cover  their  misdemeanors  and  vindicate  them  from  re- 
proach and  injury,  he  fumed,  stormed,  and  perspired  at  every 
pore ;  and  he  happened  to  have  an  intense  hatred  to  scare- 
crows of  Jesuitical,  papistical  French.  He  bounced  right 
into  the  parlor  at  the  Shottery  Cottage,  without  heeding  the 
"  Tiens  !  Rabshakeh  !"  of  Madame,  and  without  waiting 
for  the  heavy  march  of  Priscille,  who  stood  in  awe  of  him,  if 
she  stood  in  awe  of  any  body.  It  was  not  that  Mr.  Lush- 
ington had  the  most  distant  wish  to  recover  "my  lady's 
trapesing  prodigy;  but  then  what  right  had  she  to  scud 
off  as  if  she  had  taken  pisen,when  her  victuals  had  been 
as  good  as  quality  junketing?"  He  himself  had  filled  her 
glass  with  such  old  Bordeaux  as  he  would  warrant  she  had 
never  tasted  in  her  fine  France.  Yes,  she  must  be  rated 
soundly,for  it  was  not  for  the  honor  of  the  castle  to  stand 
such  doings.  It  made  him  mad  to  think  of  such  notice  being 
wasted  on  a  slothful  outlandish  pack,  when  there  were  fam- 
ilies and  families  of  honest  liritons  who  would  have  worked 
hard  to  deserve  it. 

Yolande  knew  that  Mr.  Lushington  was  a  great  authority 
in  the  castle,  that  he  was  a  foe  of  another  calibre  from  the 


158  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY 

chaplain,  and  that  perhaps,  she  had  never  seen  so  magnificent 
and  autocratical  a  personage  in  her  life  as  he  who  now  stood 
there,  all  swelling  in  his  purple  and  scarlet.  Still,  she  took 
his  rating  bravely. 

But  though  Yolande  was  brave  enough  to  present  a  cold, 
stiff  front  to  the  enemy,  she  did  not  attempt  to  defend  herself. 
She  no  more  dreamed  of  warming,  and  melting,  and  mak- 
ing an  appeal  to  the  generosity,  the  fairness,  or  the  human- 
ity of  her  assailant,  than  of  appealing  to  one  of  Lady  Rolle's 
snorting  coach-horses,  or  to  a  bellowing  bull  in  the  park. 
It  was  Grand' mere  who  took  rapid  measure  of  Mr.  Lushing- 
ton's  massive  proportions  and  made  the  attack ;  and  she  did 
it  with  manifest  zest  and  enjoyment,  becoming  for  the 
nonce  more  quaintly  proverbial,  more  fluent,  more  graphic 
than  ever. 

"  Ca,  you  will  surely  not  speak  to  our  backs,  Maitre  Bon- 
homme,  and  we  only  thi'ee  rags  of  women  ?  You  are  a 
brave  man.  We  also  know  what  bravery  is.  We  had  our 
Schomburg,  our  Ruvigny,  and  you  English  heard  of  them 
too,  and  helped  yourselves  to  their  bravery  at  the  Boyne 
and  at  Oudenarde.  And  we  are  all  baked  with  the  same 
flour,  though  we  were  from  the  side  of  St.  Louis.  Ah ! 
there  is  still  a  quarter  of  your  London  which  you  call  Petty 
France,  and  what  would  you  do  for  water-gilding,  clock- 
making,  sign-painting,  hair-dressing,  and  perfumery  without 
its  inhabitants  ?  What  would  you  do  for  silk-weaving 
without  Spitalfields  ?  We  are  not  lizards  to  bask  in  the  sun 
(if  we  had  the  sun  to  bask  in),  as  you  say.  We  are  good  cit- 
izens, peaceful  and  diligent.  We  do  not  drink,  nor  do  we 
swear ;  none  of  us  waylay  and  stab,  save  Gardelle  and  Guis- 
carde,  who  are  the  only  two  miserable  criminals  among  us. 
You  remember  all  these  things  at  present,  and  you  begin  to 
respect  us  a  little  for  our  patience,  our  endurance,  our  inge- 
nuity. All  that  is  true,  Maitre  Lushington,  and  you  compre- 
hend it  because  you  are  one  of  the  English  who  could  be  as 
patient  and  enduring,  though  not  as  ingenious,  in  adversity. 
You  can  not  save  yourselves  from  a  suspicion  of  esteem, 
even  while  you  '  humph  !  humph  !'  and  thrust  your  hands 
into  your  breeches'  pockets,  while  you  look  at  our  skips 
and  our  shrugs  or  listen  to  our  chatter." 

"  Antic  fiddlers,  mountebanks  !"  growled  his  honor,  with 
a  shade  of  shame  on  his  broad  visage. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  159 

"  Alas !  I  fear  we  vex  you  horribly,"  continued  Grand'- 
mere.  "  Still,  you  harbor  us,  you  serve  yourselves  with  us, 
and,  in  spite  of  the  national  antipathy,  you  esteem  those  of 
the  more  who  have  renounced  our  fatherland  for  what  we 
us  call  duty,  freedom,  and  purity.  What !  we  disobeyed  our 
Louis,  as  you  disobeyed  your  Charles  and  your  James,  only 
we  were  not  fire-eaters  ;  we  have  not  gone  above  the  houses 
like  you.  These  hands  must  grow  more  like  claws  with 
emptiness,  and  redder  with  desperation,  unbound  by  law  or 
gospel,  before  they  tear  down  the  sacred  majesty  of  kings. 
It  is  in  the  nature  of  the  French,  Romanist  and  Reformed, 
to  be  loyal  as  the  lilies  are  white." 

"  If  you  are  so  loyal,  why  did  not  the  girl  bide  in  her  serv- 
ice ?"  interposed  Mr.  Lushington.  "  A  fig  for  her  loyalty, 
to  break  the  bargain  and  run  off  like  an  ill-doer!  The  flag- 
ons and  scones,  my  lord's  and  Mr.  George's  nick-nacks,  my 
lady's  rings,  are  all  to  the  fore" — so  he  did  not  mean  to 
bring  any  accusation  on  that  score. 

"My  little  daughter  entered  the  service  of  my  lady — 
good,"  said  Grand'mere,  emphatically ;  "  she  quitted  it 
again  without  the  ceremony  of  asking  leave  to  do  so — bad. 
Have  you  a  daughter  of  your  own,  Maitre  Lushington  ?" 

The  butler  shook  his  ambrosial  curls  and  smiled  grimly 
in  the  negative.  "No,  nor  ever  a  dame,  I'm  thankful  to 
say,  mistress." 

"  Ah,  well,  I  compassiouate  you,"  said  Grand'mere,  throw- 
ing in  her  gracious  pity  with  a  wave  of  her  hand.  "  But 
you  had  a  good  mother  once.  Suppose  she  had  entered  the 
service  of  the  old  seigneur." 

"  She  !"  interrupted  the  butler  in  a  towering  passion.  "  She 
were  a  good  mother  and  that  bean't  a  likely  or  a  sightly 
supposing.  Mother  were  as  honest  a  woman  as  ever  step- 
ped ;  she  could  not  taste  a  cool  tankard,  let  alone  sack-whey 
or  burnt  brandy.  She  would  not  have  known  a  card  from  a 
wagon-ticket.  She  could  spell  a  chapter  in  the  Bible,  for 
she  was  a  scholard,  but  she  read  nought  besides  except  the 
tallies  and  the  trades'  tokens.  My  sisters,  Cherry  and  Moll, 
were  such  likes.  I  can  tell  you,  feythcr's  woman  had  no 
trade  with  the  castle." 

"  And  if  they  had  once  entered  it  by  one  great  mistake  and 
misfortune,  say  you,  would  you  never  have  forgiveD  them  if 
they  had  found  their  way  out  again  as  quickly  as  possible  ?" 


100  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

"I  have  nought  to  say  in  answer  to  such  a  question,"  re- 
plied Mr.  Lushington,  shortly  and  surlily,  after  a  pause,  dur- 
ing which  he  had  fingered  a  wart  on  his  round  chin  as  if  he 
had  meant  to  pluck  it  off  by  main  force.  "  Things  are  not 
consorts,  as  my  brother  the  sailor,  who  licked  the  French 
under  the  great  Admiral  Benbow,  was  wont  to  say." 

"And  found  them  difficult,  very  difficult,  to  lick,  Maitre 
Lushington,"  maintained  Grand'mere,  with  imperturbable 
good-humor.  "  You  will  admit  that,  for  the  sake  of  your 
brother." 

"  Wounds !  you  have  me  there,  madame,"  granted  Mr. 
Lushington,  unable  to  resist  making  the  admission. 

"And  are  there  not  some  things  still  that  Maitre  Lush- 
ington would  not  give  up  to  his  masters — would  count  more 
precious  than  their  favor,  and  which  he  would  not  wish  to 
persecute  and  destroy  poor  strangers  for  seeking  to  spare  ?" 

Mr.  Lushington  marched  out  of  the  Shottery  Cottage 
without  another  word.  He  came  back  again,  however,  to 
tell  Grand'mere,  in  his  bluff  fashion,  that  nobody  from  the 
castle,  with  his  consent,  would  trouble  her  on  hers. 

The  first  result  of  this  interview  was  a  messenger  with 
his  honor's  respects  and  a  bunch  of  English  sweet  herbs  to 
the  old  French  madam.  And  this  was  followed  by  the 
same  messenger,  bearing  in  succession  the  same  respects, 
and  a  string  of  hog's  puddings,  a  pitcher  of  clotted  cream, 
and  a  basket  of  what  were  left  of  the-winter's  pippins. 

Grand'mere  met  all  the  respects  and  the  gifts  with  the 
most  enthusiastic  compliments  to  "the  noble  donor,"  her 
"very excellent  and  most  honorable  friend,  Maitre  Lushing- 
ton," from  his  "  highly  obliged  and  deeply-indebted  servi- 
teur,  Genevieve  Dupuy." 


CHAPTER  XIV. 

THE  MAN    OF  THE  WORLD  AND  THE  WOMAN   OF  THE  CLOSET. 

Monsieur  returned  to  Sedge  Pond  even  more  bland  and 
polite  than  he  had  set  out,  expecting  to  surpass  the  hopes 
and  desires  of  his  woman.  He  had  brought  a  top-knot  for 
Yolande ;  and  had  procured  through  a  compatriot,  not  with- 
out trouble  and  expense,  a  real  live  orange-tree,  grander  than 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY,  101 

any  of  the  Italian  pines  and.  Guernsey  lilies  of  the  famous 
castle  gardens,  to  lend  the  true  French  air  to  Grand'mure's 
jardiniere.  And  he  had  shown  a  desire  to  suit  the  tastes  of 
each,  for  he  presented  to  Madame  a  memoir  in  which  the  de- 
tails of  the  watch  of  St.  Barthelemi  and  of  the  galleys  were 
set  down  with  more  ghastly  precision  than  ever.  To  her 
such  details  lent  a  strong  relish  to  life,  keener  than  Graud'- 
mere's  fragrant  orange-tree  could  lend. 

And  Monsieur,  selfish  as  he  was,  did  not  cease  to  be  mind- 
ful of  the  inclinations  of  his  wife,  though  he  received  only 
groans  and  taunts  in  return  for  his  little  cares.  He  was  by 
no  means  deficient  in  the  courtesies  and  charities  of  life,  but 
he  was  inscrutable  at  once  in  constitution  and  conduct,  not- 
withstanding his  having  been  set  down  as  only  a  shabby, 
disreputable  plotter  in  the  mind  of  Lady  Rolle.  He  sat  in 
his  cabinet  and  pored  over  commercial  bills  and  weavers'  fig- 
ures, or  he  waited  on  for  the  mail,  overwhelming  Mr.  Hoad- 
ley  and  Mr.  Lushington  with  civility  every  time  they  cross- 
ed his  path.  Yet  somehow  the  poor  chaplain  and  the  sub- 
stantial butler  agreed  on  one  point — they  both  entertained 
entire  distrust  of  the  sallow  foreign  gentleman. 

Monsieur,  in  the  intervals  of  his  absorbing  preoccupation, 
played  the  lover  to  Grand'mere  (who  brightened  afresh  as 
a  French  mother  brightens  at  a  French  son's  redeeming  ten- 
derness), treated  his  wife  with  bourgeois  good-breeding  and 
carelessness,  and  dealt  to  Yolande  a  modified  version  of  the 
same,  perhaps  with  a  shade  less  deference  and  a  shade  more 
interest.  Going  out  one  day  he  chanced  to  encounter  my 
lady's  coach,  and  lilting  his  hat  clean  off  his  peruke,  he  first 
received  in  return  a  haughty  stare,  and  then  an  imperious 
wave  to  the  coach  door,  where  he  stood  and  conversed  for 
ten  minutes. 

The  effect  of  that  ten  minutes  conversation  was  soon  man- 
ifested. Monsieur  returned  to  the  cottage,  went  up  to  \  0- 
lande,  pinched  her  cheek,  and  said  to  her  lightly  enough — 

"  What  is  this,  my  child  ?  Art  thou  of  years  enough  to 
make  rules  ?" 

lie  then  announced  to  Grand'mere  and  Madame  that  his 
daughter  was  next  day  to  go  back  to  the  castle,  to  the  gra- 
cious protection  of  mv  lad  v. 

"  Oh,  father  !  for  pity's  sake,"  plead  Yolande,  so  agitated 
that  her  words  were  nearly  inarticulate. 


162  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

"  The  affair  is  settled,"  he  answered  her,  coolly.  '  "  Is  not 
the  first  principle  obedience  to  parents,  my  well-instructed 
fifiUe  r 

Now,  unless  in  the  utmost  extremity,  Grand'mere  shrank 
from  opposing  her  son.  The  worldly-minded,  cynical, 
scheming  man  was  so  devoted  to  her,  and  so  fond  of  her, 
and  Grand'mere's  sense  of  filial  duty,  like  every  body  else's 
to  whom  duty  has  any  meaning,  was  immoderately  high. 
Grand'mere  thought  that  if  she  entreated  her  son  he  would 
yield  his  most  fixed  determination,  his  most  cherished  wish, 
and  even  forego  his  dearest  advantage.  But  just  because 
her  influence  over  Monsieur  was  unbounded,  Grand'mere 
was  loth  to  exert  it  even  on  behalf  of  her  darling.  So  she 
endured  an  agony  of  doubt  while  she  hung  back  and  let 
Madame  oppose  her  husband's  project.  And  Madame,  who 
in  the  moroseness  and  recklessness  of  her  fierce  fanaticism 
was  at  last  roused  to  the  difference  between  Yolande's 
drinking  tea  and  supping  at  the  rectory,  and  her  dining  and 
turning  night  into  day  and  day  into  night  at  the  castle,  at 
last  spoke  her  mind  : 

"  My  husband,"  she  said,  following  Monsieur  to  the  thresh- 
old of  his  den,  "  I  must  have  a  word  with  you.  Some 
words  are  no  more  welcome  than  hail  showers  in  May  ;  but 
the  peach-trees  have  to  bear  the  one,  and  the  men  ought  to 
bear  the  other." 

"  A  bushel  of  stones  and  of  words,  my  good  Philippine," 
acquiesced  Monsieur,  leading  his  panting  wife  jauntily 
through  the  narrow  lane  made  by  chests  and  packing 
boxes. 

"  Bah  !  words  arc  easily  said,"  protested  the  incorrigible 
woman,  as  she  sat  in  the  leather-covered  chair.  "  It  is  good 
deeds  which  show  that  men  are  pious  and  pure,  and  not  the 
deeds  of  a  worldling,  a  traitor,  my  fine  Monsieur." 

"  If  one  snivels  let  him  blow  his  nose,"  reflected  Monsieur, 
composedly, "  but  I  do  not  snivel ;  and,  pardon  me,  but  I  am 
astonished  that  a  woman  so  wise  and  so  diligent,  and  whom 
I  have  the  felicity  to  name  my  wife,  should  break  in  upon 
business  to  tell  me  an  incontestable  truth  ;  but  out  of  place 
— without  doubt  out  of  place." 

So  Monsieur  calmly  assured  Madame,  as  he  stood  there 
with  one  hand  in  his  breast,  while  with  the  long  yellow  fin- 
gers of  the  other  he  rapped  on  the  table. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  1G3 

"  You  give  up  all  for  business,"  said  Madame  hotly. 
"  What  hours  are  left  you  for  meditation  ?" 

"Perhaps  I  believe  that  my  Philippine  spends  enough  of 
time  in  that  to  serve  both.  Perhaps  on  Huguenot  princi- 
ples, my  dear,  I  decline  to  render,  even  to  my  wife,  an  ac- 
count of  my  soul,  as  to  a  father  confessor." 

"  Father  of  Yolande  !" — Madame  apostrophized  him  in 
strange  dramatic  form,  not  without  power  in  its  complete 
concentrated  earnestness — "  the  castle  of  the  English  quality 
is  full  of  men  and  women  who  are  bold,  corrupt,  and 
wicked !" 

"  Mother  of  Yolande,  I  know  all  that,"  answered  Mon- 
sieur, emphatically ;  "  but  a  woman  of  the  haute  noblesse 
has  given  me  her  word  of  honor  that  not  a  hair  of  the  child's 
head  shall  be  injured,  and  not  a  spot  shall  come  upon  her 
reputation." 

"I  crack  my  fingers  at  her  ladyship's  head,  and  at  her 
reputation.  It  is  Yolande's  faith  in  God,  Monsieur,  her  im- 
mortal soul,  that  I  care  for." 

But  it  would  have  been  easier  to  remove  a  mountain  than 
to  shake  Monsieur's  philosophy  by  such  blows  as  these. 

"  Yes,"  answered  Monsieur^  with  polite  acquiescence, 
"  but  her  faith  to  be  faith  must  be  tested ;  her  soul  if  im- 
mortal can  not  be  hurt  by  all  the  adverse  forces  in  the  world. 
You  believe  that,  Madame  ?  My  mother  believes  it,  and 
you  believe  too,  that  the  soul  is  in  good  keeping.  Fl.fi,  done  ! 
what  can  the  greatest  reprobate  of  a  father — and  I  assure 
you  that  there  are  fathers  worse  than  I — do  against  the  soul 
of  a  daughter  ?  Do  you  ask  me  to  teach  you  the  catechism 
at  this  time  of  day  ?" 

"You  can  do  nothing,  nothing  against  the  soul  of  the 
child  save  cast  it  into  the  fires  of  temptation.  The  good 
God  be  praised  for  that!  But  you  will  not  do  that,  my 
husband?"  wept  Madame,  with  a  persistency  the  more 
pathetic  as  it  softened  and  waxed  more  womanly,  but  nev- 
er wavered. 

"  To  harden  it  ?  Perhaps  yes.  But  I  do  not  deceive  you, 
Philippine,  whatever  you  may  think.  I  am  very  sorry  to 
refuse  you  a  true  request,  but  I  must  do  it.  You  oblige  me 
to  tell  you  that  you  arc  an  enthusiast,  a  devotee,  like  the 
dear  old  woman.  I  acknowledge,  I  appreciate  your  good 
intentions,  though  you  arc  unfortunate  enough  to  have  a 


164  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

sombre  humor,  my  poor,  unreasonable  Philippine.  But 
never  mind.     I  understand  it ;  it  does  not  hurt  me  at  all." 

So  Monsieur  encouraged  his  wife,  not  unkindly,  in  the 
midst  of  his  discipline  and  defiance. 

"  Not  one  of  you  knows  a  straw  of  the  world  in  which 
you  live,  the  actual  world  of  fools,  knaves,  despots,  and 
slaves,"  he  went  on  with  the  calm  assurance  of  superiority. 
"  You  exaggerate  horribly,  and  you  teach  Yolande  to  exag- 
gerate. It  matters  not  for  you,  but  it  may  matter  a  great 
deal  for  her.  For  the  rest,  in  Catholic  families,  even  the 
most  rigid,  where  one  member  has  a  vocation,  that  is  held 
to  be  enough.  Must  all  my  women  have  vocations  because 
we  are  Huguenots?  The  grande  dame  condescends  to 
fifille,  and  promises  to  make  her  fortune.  In  the  mean  time 
fifille  is  fastidious,  impertinent,  and  ungrateful  to  a  marvel. 
Ah,  well !  flfille  must  go  back,  beg  my  lady's  pardon,  re-enter 
her  service,  and  thank  me  that  I  say,  with  the  great  Henry, 
'  Paris  is  worth  more  than  a  mass,'  to  the  end  of  her  life." 

"  And  from  beyond  the  tomb  ?"  questioned  Madame,  fix- 
edly. 

"  One  can  not  tell  what  she  will  say  from  beyond  the 
tomb,  my  dear  Madame,"  Monsieur  urged,  with  the  utmost 
affability. 

"  My  husband,  you  are  a  sceptic,  a  Turk,  a  heathen ! — 
you  are  no  Huguenot,  save  as  regards  your  miserable  poli- 
tics." 

"  I  have  the  honor  to  salute  you,  my  wife.  If  you  say  so, 
I  shall  not  be  so  rude  as  to  contradict  you ;  besides,  you 
ought  to  know  best." 

"  What  devil  has  you  in  his  hold,  that  you  should  send  a 
young  girl,  even  though  she  were  not  yours,  to  destruction  ?" 
urged  Madame,  goaded  to  a  kind  of  despair. 

"  I  have  never  seen  the  destruction ;  and,  for  one  thing, 
I  have  no  wish  to  find  Ji/ille  promoted  to  dress  St.  Cathe- 
rine's hair." 

"  Oh  !  the  equivocation,"  exclaimed  Madame,  scornfully  ; 
"  there  is  something  more  than  that." 

"  There  is  something  more  than  that,"  granted  Monsieur  ; 
"  it  is  for  my  well-being  and  that  of  my  countrymen,  for  my 
safety  and  yours,  that  I  do  what  is  possible,  and  that  Yoland- 
ette  accepts  the  role  of  Esther  without  ceremony.  What 
will  you  do  if  on  next  fair-day  the  peasants  cease  shouting 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  165 

at  the  old  women  who  grin  through  the  horse-collars,  and 
at  the  dancing  bears,  and  commence  to  pelt  the  Shottery 
Cottage  Avith  big  stones,  and  fire  en  face,  as  the  English 
Jacquerie  pelted  and  fired  like  demons  during  the  Iteedham 
elections  ?" 

"  Let  them  do  so,"  boasted  Madame,  proudly.  "  I  have 
no  fear.  I  give  my  body  with  the  other  bodies  to  be  burn- 
ed for  the  good  of  the  souls." 

"  Truly  !"  Monsieur  submitted  mildly ;  "  but  though  it 
would  be  the  folly  of  the  cross,  against  which  as  a  mere 
mortal  I  say  nothing,  it  would  not  be  at  all  pleasant,  my 
Philippine,  to  a  mere  mortal.  Go  !  you  are  an  ancient,  and 
I  a  modern  Huguenot,  which  are  quite  different  things.  For 
me,  I  think  that  the  Huguenots  have  already  been  martyrs' 
enough,  for  all  the  harvest  they  have  reaped,  or  all  the  effect 
they  have  had  on  the  world,  to  my  knowledge." 

"Monsieur,  I  forbid  my  daughter  to  go  to  the  castle 
again !"  said  Madame,  vehemently. 

"Madame,  I  forbid  my  wife  to  forbid  my  child  to  do 
what  I  command.  Art  thou  not  my  wife  ?"  asked  Monsieur, 
quietly. 

"  Alas  !  yes,"  lamented  Madame  openly,  as  incapable  of 
denying  a  true  impeachment  as  she  was  of  the  smallest  self- 
restraint  and  concealment.  "  But  it  is  over  my  body  that 
you  will  take  Yolande  from  this  house." 

"  By  no  means.  Your  body  is  my  property.  I  shall  not 
let  it  lie  where  it  will  sustain  the  least  damage;  you  may 
depend  upon  that,  my  excellent  Philippine." 

Madame  had  done  her  little  to  defend  her  daughter — 
there  was  nothing  for  it  now  but  that  Grand'mere  should 
enter  the  lists  and  beseech  her  son's  clemency. 

"  My  son,  the  little  one  did  not  like  the  castle,"  whispered 
the  old  woman  to  the  mature  man  hanging  over  her. 

"The  little  one  knows  not  what  is  good  for  her.  You 
have  spoiled  her,  my  mother,  as  you  spoiled  your  doubtful 
character  of  a  son,  before  her." 

"  Say  you,  then,  that  I  have  spoiled  you,  Hubert  ?" 

"  Yes,  but  by  your  supreme  goodness,  my  mother." 

"The  little  one  fears  the  great  wild  castle,  Hubert.  If 
you  could  feel  her  heart,  you  would  discover  that  at  the 
thought  of  the  castle  it  beats  like  the  heart  of  one  of  my 
birds'." 


1G6  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

"What!  a  poltroon, not  a  heroine,  descended  from  the 
mother  and  you,  as  well  from  myself!  How  trying  !  But 
Ave  have  all  sprung  from  the  side  of  Adam,  and  that,  well 
understood,  explains  it  all.  The  women  love  the  beatings' 
of  the  heart ;  one  of  your  birds  has  said  that  to  my  cap. 
But  your  heart  beats  not ;  it  has  too  much  of  the  serenity 
of  heaven,  good  mother.  As  for  that  of  my  Philippine,  it 
beats  not  neither — not  even  like  a  drum  or  an  alarm-clock — 
no,  indeed !  for  it  bounds  and  whizzes  like  a  gigantic  ma- 
chine." 

"  Do  you  count  it  a  great  affair  for  you,  my  son,  that  the 
child  of  my  age  should  leave  me  and  my  white  hairs,  to  keep 
company  with  the  dissolute  quality  of  the  godless  world  ?" 
•  "  A  great  affair,"  answered  Monsieur,  very  gravely ; 
"needs  ma  mh°e  to  ask  that?  It  insures  my  success  in  a 
large  venture ;  the  quality  have  as  much  in  their  power  in 
trade  as  in  other  things.  You  know  I  am  born  bourgeois 
and  tradesman,  and  I  can  not  quit  trade  till  I  quit  life.  The 
patronage  of  Lady  Rolle  for  Yolande,  and  through  Yolande 
for  the  family,  for  the  weavers,  the  emigres,  keeps  me  in 
shelter,  and  gives  me  confidence — it  makes  the  way  easy  for 
me." 

"My  son,"  said  Grand'mere,  softly  and  sadly,  as  she  turn- 
ed away  her  head,  "  will  you  let  the  way  be  difficult  for  my 
sake  ?" 

"  That  suffices,  mother,  if  you  will  it.  Poor  little  mother, 
youknow  not —  But  you  will  it.  The  darling  of  Grand'mere 
stays  and  marries  the  Methodist  preaching  squire,  who  cer- 
tainly flings  not  his  handkerchief  to  her,  or  the  poor  dinner- 
table  priest,  or  else  she  remains  an  old  maid,  to  be  robbed  on 
all  sides,  and  at  last  murdered  in  her  bed  for  her  night-cap 
and  the  bed-pan,  who  knows  ?  Since  I  came  to  this  En- 
gland I  have  seen  a  servant  burned  with  faggots  for  the  mur- 
der of  her  mistress  ;  but  Yolande  is  the  child  of  Grand'mere, 
as  I  am  the  child  of  Grand'nicre,  and  Grand'mere  does 
what  she  wills  with  both  her  children." 

Then  Monsieur  kissed  Grand'mere's  hand  and  left  her,  and 
when  he  was  out  of  her  sight  he  struck  his  forehead  and 
gnawed  his  nails  in  bitter  disappointment  and  sore  vexa- 
tion. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  1G' 


CHAPTER  XV. 

AUDREY  THROCKMORTON. 

Spring  had  come  to  Sedge  Pond  at  last.  But  it  was  not 
the  spring  of  biting  winds,  blinding  dust,  and  stinging  hail ; 
it  was  the  spring  that  is  page  and  usher  to  the  summer,  and 
is  so  young,  tender,  and  graceful  that  the  man  in  his  strength 
who  is  to  follow  after  is  hardly  thought  of  or  desired.  A 
spring  unerringly  acknowledged  by  all  living  and  even  by  all 
inanimate  things :  by  the  ring-dove  and  the  lapwing,  the  hum- 
ble-bee and  the  dragon-fly  ;  in  the  woods  now  bursting  into 
a  flush  of  delicate  green  brushed  with  fruitful  brown  ;  on  the 
Waaste  with  yellow  trails  of  golden  gorse  ;  by  the  water 
with  the  white  ranunculus  budding  among  the  still  sere  flags 
and  rushes.  Grand'rnere  was  at  once  like  ring-dove  and  lap- 
wing, like  the  hoariest  old  oak  in  the  castle  park  and  the 
stiflest  old  hound  in  the  castle  kennel.  She  had  a  heart  still 
green,  which  awoke  throbbing  obediently  to  God's  signal  in 
the  gentle  breath  of  his  south  wind,  as  it  had  done  for  four- 
score years.  All  personal  trouble,  loss,  and  infirmity  wore 
put  on  one  side  as  she  smiled  back  to  God's  smile  on  the  face 
of  the  earth,  rejoicing  like  the  angels  that  in  spite  of  confu- 
sion, perplexity,  sin,  suflering,  aud  death,  all  was  indeed  "very 
good. 

One  morning  in  May,  Grand'rnere,  by  the  help  of  Yolande 
and  Madame  Rougeole,  had  made  the  tour  of  her  alky, 
her  terrace,  her  fish-pond,  and  had  reached  her  arbor. 
Although  her  voice  was  cracked  she  cried  out  first,  and  most 
sweetly,  at  the  sight  of  dusky  violet  and  dainty  jonquille. 

It  was  here  in  the  arbor  that  Lady  Rolle  had  been  so  lain 
to  sit  with  her  old  friend,  to  make  the  illusion  of  a  French 
pastoral  complete.  To  farther  this  she  would  not  have  mind- 
ed forcing  Yolande  into  the  character  of  Clil<>^,  and  .Air. 
Hoadley,  or  any  other  hired  servant,  into  that  of  Corydon, 
so  that  she  might  the  better  trifie  with  the  seasons,  and  make 
believe  that  March  was  May,  even  at  the  risk  of  consigning 
rGrand'inere  to  the  torments  of  rheumatism,  or  to  a  fatal 
quinsy  or  pleurisy.     My  lady  would  havethe  small  gratifica- 


168  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

tion  of  beholding  and  forming  one  in  such  a  group,  even 
though  it  should  fall  to  pieces  in  her  hands  and  its  members 
should  perish  in  the  fragments. 

But  now  May  was  come,  and  Grand'mere  thought  of  the 
great  lady  pensively,  and  with  many  excuses.  Of  what  was 
frank  as  the  day  in  Lady  Rolle,  of  her  dauntlessncss,  her 
stauclmess,  and  her  kindness,  Grand'mere  was  fully  appre- 
ciative. Sitting  framed  in  periwinkle  and  ivy,  she  was,a  pict- 
ure of  faith  and  meekness,  at  once  balmy  and  beautiful. 
But  she  could  not  help  hankering  after  the  troubled  spirit  of 
the  great  lady,  and  owning  to  herself  that  the  vindictive  ha- 
tred which  Yolande's  abandonment  of  the  castle,  and  the 
Dupuys'  rejection  of  all  overtures  from  the  Rolles,  had  call- 
ed forth,  would  have  power  to  wound  her  in  spite  of  the 
deep  experiences  of  her  long  pilgrimage.  Still,  Lady  Rolle' s 
sweeping  accusations  of  heartlessness  and  insolence,  her  re- 
vilings  and  her  blazing  resentment,  would  cut  Grand'mere  to 
the  very  heart — that  heart  which  age  could  neither  benumb 
nor  petrify.  It  Avas  only  in  looking  back  at  the  past,  with 
its  tribulation  ended  and  its  mercy  alone  undying,  that 
Grand'mere  dwelt  on  the  clear,  shining  hills  of  Beulah,  above 
the  mists  of  distraction  and  the  thunderbolts  of  suffering. 
So  she  sat  and  spent  a  sigh  on  the  great  lady,  who  was  im- 
measurably farther  from  Madame  de  Sevigne  than  was 
Grand'mere  herself,  though  Grand'mere  did  not  see  it. 

Without  prelude  or  preparation,  without  the  roll  of  her 
chariot  wheels,  or  the  tramp  of  the  horses'  hoofs,  the  honey- 
suckle, periwinkle,  and  ivy  seemed  to  part  as  by  the  wave  of 
Merlin's  wand,  and  my  lady,  in  her  superb  train,  and  jewels, 
and  shepherdess's  hat,  stood  in  the  opening  among  the  soft 
shadowy  leaves,  scorching  Grand'mere  herself  a  little,  and 
causing  Yolande  to  shrivel  up  in  a  corner  in  something  like 
an  ecstasy  of  dismay,  for  my  lady's  face  was  more  than  ever 
like  an  illuminated  mask,  behind  which  burned  pride  and 
passion.  But,  as  if  wholly  to  balk  anticipation,  Lady  Rolle 
showed  no  sense  of  the  discord  between  her  and  the  Dupuys, 
nor  did  she  display  any  animosity  even  to  the  chief  culprit, 
beyond  shaking  her  finger  at  her,  and  crying  out: 

"  Child,  you've  been  prodigious  naughty  !  you've  almost 
forced  me  to  have  words  with  my  good  old  jMadame. 
Mighty  line,  indeed,  when  chicks  like  you  are  to  take  alarm, 
and  fly  off  ina  hurry-scurry,  without  even  a  note  to  the  old 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  169 

bird  whose  cluck  has  offended  their  delicate  ears.  But  go 
to  roost,  or  where  you  will  now,  child,  for  I  want  to  speak  to 
Grand'niere's  sober  ears  alone." 

Yolande  gladly  tripped  off  to  the  house,  while  Lady  Rolle 
sat  down  beside  Graud'mere.  She  spread  herself  out  on  the 
seat,  and  put  up  her  fan,  but  soon  forgot  it  again,  and  let  it 
drop  in  her  lap  in  the  heat  of  her  conversation  : 

"  Goody,  I've  come  to  tell  you  my  story — ladies  of  quality 
have  told  a  vast  deal  worse  ones  in  far  more  discreditable 
quarters  before  now.  I  wish  to  enlighten  you  as  to  my  in- 
tentions, that  you  may  no  longer  thwart  me,  and  stand  in  a 
peevish  baby's  light." 

My  lady  began  at  the  very  beginning. 

"  Ah !"  she  said,  "  dear  Goody,  I  guess  my  early  days 
were  very  different  from  yours,  and  I  vow  the  chances  and 
changes  I  have  known  would  astonish  you.     I  was  mother- 
less as  a  child  in  the  house  of  my  father,  a  wild  living,  bro- 
ken-down country  justice.     It  was  a  coarse,  rough,  riotous 
life  that  was  led  in  our  house,  and  our  notion  of  the  whole 
duty  of  woman  was  that  she  should  be  able  to  work  frills, 
to  keep  accounts  by  an  effort  of  genius,  to  ride  on  Dobbin 
when  allowed,  and  to  dance  cotillions  when  possible.     One 
great  point  in  my  duty  was  to  keep  out  of  sight  and  sound 
of  those  orgies  which  left  my  father  so  morose  and  madden- 
ed in  humor  that  he  would  not  speak  to  me  for  mouths  at 
a  time,  but  would  go  about  burning  the  books  in  his  library, 
and  smashing  what  furniture  was  still  left  him  to  break. 
When  I  was  an  ignorant  and  helpless,  but  not  overinnocent 
child  of  fifteen — and  I  was  never  troubled  with  dullness  or 
innocence — I  was  called  from  spelling  out  a  dream-book, 
and  playing  with  a  litter  of  puppies  in  the  alcove  above  the 
bee-hives  in  the  garden,  to  the  side  of  my  father's  chair, 
where,  suffering  from  gout,  he  sat  like  a  chained  bear.     I 
was  to  be  presented  to  my  future  husband,  Lord  Rolle,  who 
had  won  me,  the  best  part  of  the  prize,  and  the  inheritance 
of  my  father's  acres,  at  the  hazard-table  the  previous  night. 
Ah !  dear  Goody,  that  was  scarcely  the  way  to  make  a  lov- 
ing pair  of  us.     To  this  day  I  confess  to  you  I  hate  the 
marriage  and  the  bridegroom,  not  because  my  lord  was  old, 
and  had  the  worst  character,  as  well  as  the  highest  posi- 
tion in  the  county,  not  because  he  was  a  widower.  \vl 
usage  of  his  first  wife,  according  to  rumor,  had  been  shamc- 

H 


170  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

ful,  but  because  be  had  a  splay  foot,  a  nose  reddened  with 
wine,  and  was  altogether  so  bloated  and  ugly,  that  the  chil- 
dren of  Sedge  Pond  screamed  when  his  muff  and  night-cap 
appeared  at  his  coach  window." 

Lady  Rolle  saw  that  Grand'mere  shuddered  at  her  plain 
speech,  and  stopped  for  a  moment,  expecting  her  to  speak ; 
but  Grand'mere  remaining  silent,  she  went  on  to  tell  in  de- 
tail of  the  wicked  mockery  of  her  wooing,  and  the  barbar- 
ous persecution  which  she  had  had  to  undergo,  and  the  fran- 
tic struggles  she  had  made  to  free  herself. 

"  I  can  tell  you  I  nearly  destroyed  my  fine  plumes — cer- 
tainly I  soiled  them — in  my  mad  struggle  to  escape.  Only 
bethink  you  of  a  mere  chick  of  a  girl  going  disguised  as  a 
farm-servant  in  a  wagon  to  London,  where  she  had  not  a 
friend,  and  where  the  chances  were  that,  in  place  of  good 
Samaritans,  she  would  meet  with  thieves  viler  than  those 
that  plied  their  trade  between  Jerusalem  and  Jericho.  But 
I  could  dare  that  and  more,  good  Grand'mere.  I  was  soon 
followed  and  brought  back,  however;  and  I  was  so  mad 
with  disappointment  and  vexation  that  I  stuffed  my  long 
hair  into  my  throat  to  make  way  with  myself,  till  my  father 
had  it  clipped  as  bare  as  shears  would  clip  it,  and  would  not 
suffer  me  even  to  cover  the  deformity  with. a  wrig.  And 
then,  when  I  was  so  ashamed  by  the  fright  they  had  made 
me,  and  by  the  cackles  of  the  servants  about  me,  that  I 
would  have  given  in  to  marrying  a  man  witW  a  calf's  head, 
or  even  the  '  Cock  Lane  Ghost,'  my  dear  old  archdeacon 
came,  and  would  have  saved  me  if  I  had  been  to  be  saved. 
The  archdeacon  was  my  dead  mother's  uncle,  who  had  lived 
all  his  life  in  the  midst  of  his  learning  and  preferment,  in 
what  she  called  the  odor  of  sanctity.  He  had  heard  of 
my  miserable  plight,  and  traveled  all  the  way  from  his  re- 
tired, dignified  residence  in  an  episcopal  town,  to  interfere 
in  my  behalf." 

And  here  the  sharp,  domineering,  high-set  voice  of  Lady 
Rolle  involuntarily  softened ;  for  the  hardly-used  girl,  who 
had  lived  to  have  her  revenge  as  a  woman,  always  felt  a 
tender  pride  when  she  thought  of  the  good  archdeacon's 
having  taken  that  journey. 

"Ah!"  said  Grand'mere,  "there  are  priests  and  priests; 
he  must  have  been  a  pearl  among  the  dust.  You  have  had 
some  men  like  that  in  England  too." 


THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  171 

"I  never  met  such  another  as  my  clear  archdeacon,"  Lady 
Rolle  went  on,  apparently  not  noticing  Grand'rnere's  last 
remark;  "he  would  have  sacrificed  half  his  living  for  me, 
I  do  believe.  He  pledged  himself  to  Lord  Rolle  as  securi- 
ty for  the  sums  my  father  had  lost  at  the  gaming-table.  He 
put  the  two  archconspirators  against  me  to  shame  by  his 
manliness,  his  generosity,  and  his  patience ;  and  he  carried 
away  his  poor  prize  in  triumph,  to  dwell  under  the  shelter 
of  his  honorable  roof  and  his  unblemished  character." 

With  vivid  power  and  clearness  of  recollection,  Lady  Rolle 
desci'ibed  to  Grand'mere  the  peaceful  life  among  the  Church 
dignitaries,  until  she  could  see  the  noble  cathedral  aisles, 
handed  down  from  other  ages,  and  hear  the  solemn  chant- 
ing and  the  sweet  singing  of  the  evening  hymn — the  wom- 
en at  their  work-tables,  and  the  men  at  their  side  read- 
ing aloud,  and  among  them,  like  a  branded  sheep,  the  young 
girl  with  the  bare  clipped  head. 

"  Bat  it  was  not  to  be,  Grand'mere,"  Lady  Rolle  inform- 
ed her  listener,  with  a  look  of  haunting  remorse,  which  was 
very  different  from  repentance  ;  "  I  tired  of  being  good  in 
no  time.  I  was  not  pretty  behaved,  either  by  nature  or 
education ;  I  believe  badness  was  in  my  blood,  and  at  last 
the  seven  devils  so  got  possession  of  me,  that  I  began  to 
hate  the  quiet  women  and  the  sober  men,  and  even  the 
very  scent  of  the  lavender." 

"  Oh !"  said  Grand'mere,  unconsciously,  as  she  sighed 
and  looked,  if  possible,  more  pitifully  at  Lady  Rolle. 

"  But  yes,  that  is  plain  truth,  I  hate  the  very  scent  of 
lavender,  for  the  archdeacon  was  very  fond  of  lavender,  like 
that  in  your  window  ;  and  I  vow  a  waft  of  it  comes  across 
me  strangely  to  this  day.  He  grew  great  beds  of  it  under 
the  bow-windows,  and  it  was  always  associated  in  my  mind 
with  the  dullness  of  the  place,  which  I  soon  came  to  hate 
even  more  than  I  hated  Lord  Rolle  and  the  evil  odor  of  sin 
and  violence.  What  did  I  do,  quotha?  I  gave  my  wor- 
shipful father  to  know  that  I  had  grown  a  good  girl  in  the 
good  company  I  had  kept,  and  was  ready  to  do  his  bid- 
ding !  And  I  let  the  archdeacon  learn  what  a  thankful  task 
it  was  to  attempt  the  reformation  of  a  sinner.  So  the  old 
man,  mazed,  sick,  and  disappointed,  bowed  his  head  which 
was  as  white  as  yours,  Grand'mc-rc ;  but  he  could  not 
persist  in  interfering  to  prevent  a  dutiful  daughter's  obey- 


172  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

ing  her  father  when  she  was  so  minded.  And  he  did  not 
reproach  me,  though  he  would  not  marry  me  to  my  lord,  and 
set  his  hand  to  the  deed.  A  bishop  of  Lady  Yarmouth's 
throning  did  me  that  service.  Well-a-day,  I  had  my  fill  of 
stir  and  noise,  feasting  and  brawling,  and  was  able  to  tell 
how  much  worse  was  a  brutal  tyrant  of  a  husband  than  a 
tyrant  of  a  father." 

Whether  or  not  Lord  Rolle  had  beaten  his  first  wife  black 
and  blue  like  a  butcher,  he  had  certainly  dragged  his  second 
wife  out  of  bed  by  the  hair  of  her  head,  and  had  caused 
her  to  stand — her  teeth  chattering  with  cold,  and  her  limbs 
ready  to  sink  with  weariness — from  the  dead  of  the  night 
to  the  broad  day  by  the  fauteuil  to  which  he  had  recourse 
when  he  could  not  coax  or  compel  sleep,  and  all  out  of  the 
sheerest  wantonness.  And  he  had  grudged  my  lady  her 
pocket-money,  her  clothes,  and  even  her  food,  when  his 
low  niggardly  fit  succeeded  to  his  prodigal  one. 

Lord  Rolle  had  insulted  his  wife  equally  by  his  infidelity 
and  his  jealousy. 

"And  yet,  and  yet" — my  lady  suddenly  stopped  in  her 
vehement  recital  of  unsurpassed  wrongs  to  look  Grand'mere 
in  the  face  with  her  native  sincerity,  and  to  say  regretfully 
— "  it  was  not  always  heathendom  in  our  house ;  we*  were 
not  always  tormenting  each  other  like  savages.  My  lord, 
laid  down  with  the  small-pox,  was  crying  what  would  be- 
come of  him,  for  his  very  servants  would  no  longer  put  a 
cup  of  cold  water  into  his  hand,  and  I  said,  'I  will,  my 
lord ; '  and  I  stayed  with  him  night  and  day,  and  risked 
my  life,  and  what  I  cared  more  for  than  it,  Madame,  you 
may  believe  it — my  beauty,  which  all  the  fools  raved  about, 
and  hundreds  mobbed  my  chair  to  catch  a  glimpse  of.  " 

"  My  lady,  you  did  well — you  did  well  in  that, "  said 
Grand'mere ;  "  and  surely  that  trial  and  that  tendance  made 
a  closer  bond  between  you  ?" 

"You  shall  hear,"  said  Lady  Rolle.  "I  was  spared  the 
small-pox,  and  my  lord  recovered,  and  begged  my  jjardon 
on  his  bended  knees  the  first  time  he  could  go  down  on 
them.  He  swore  never  to  abuse  me  again,  and  he  kept  his 
word — till  the  illness  was  six  months  out  of  his  head,  and  I 
had  provoked  him  beyond  measure.  Yes,  we  had  our 
chances,  if  we  had  been  resolved  to  be  good,  and  our  blood 
had  not  been  corrupt.    Then  Rolle  was  borne,  a  cross  and 


THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  173 

a  plague  from  his  birth — and  my  lord  began  to  fret  and 
pester  me  with  care  for  his  heir,  which  came  ill  off  his  hand, 
that  had  not  been  overkiud  to  his  former  children.  Why, 
what  now,  Grand'mere?  What  ails  you?"  she  interjected 
sharply,  for  Grand'mere  had  involuntarily  held  up  her  pure, 
tender  hands.  "You  need  not  cry  out.  It  was  in  Paris 
that  I  picked  up  the  charming  plan  your  French  madames 
followed — that  of  banishing  their  sprigs  from  their  hotels 
to  the  cottages  of  peasant  women  who  were  fit  to  rear  them, 
and  who  could  spare  time  to  look  after  them,  divine  Nature 
being  their  best  mother — that  was  the  jargon — and  no  more 
trouble  with  the  brats  was  given  to  the  mothers  in  the  rank 
above  being  mothers,  till  the  children  were  old  enough  to 
be  amusing,  if  that  ever  happened,  or  till  they  wanted  to 
be  taught  the  manners  of  ladies  and  gentlemen.  Our  men 
sometimes  professed  to  like  the  little  ladies  as  well  as  their 
dogs;  but  I  never  heard  of  them  caring  for  the  little  lords. 
And  if  they  left  that  fancy  to  the  women,  we  certainly  did 
not  take  it  up,  as  we  did  rock  crystal  vases  and  cream- 
ware  tea-pots.  I  protest  I  found  the  French  fashion  the 
most  natural  in  the  world,  and  I  did  what  I  could  to  bring 
it  into  vogue,  and  to  get  my  lord  to  endure  it." 

"  Ah !  how  the  miserable  French  dames  and  you  strip- 
ped yourselves  of  the  crown  of  your  womanhood,"  said 
Grand'mere,  bearing  open  and  pitying  testimony  to  her  op- 
posite experience.  Then  she  uttered  a  passionate  apostro- 
phe— "  O  Lord !  Thou  knowest  that  Thou  loadedst  me 
with  mercies  more  than  my  tongue  could  tell,  and  addedst 
but  a  few  numbered  chastisements  ;  but  the  blessings  which 
made  my  tongue  sing  for  joy  when  I  was  a  young  woman, 
and  made  me  young  again  when  I  was  grown  old  and  my 
arms  were  waxing  empty,  were  when  I  held  my  Hubert 
upon  my  knees,  and  when  the  women  said  to  me  as  they 
said  to  Xaorni  of  old,  '  There  is  a  daughter  born  to  Gene- 
vieve,' and  I  took  Yolande  and  laid  her  in  my  arms  and  be- 
came a  nurse  to  her." 

"  Yes,  yes,"  nodded  her  ladyship  in  acquiescence,  "  I 
said  at  the  first  my  life  had  been  mighty  unlike  yours, 
Grand'mere,  but  I  have  known  solitude  :is  well  as  yon. 
When  Lord  Rolle  was  at  last  struck  with  his  death-blow, 
he  took  me  out  of  the  world  and  shut  me  up  with  him  in 
the  castle.     And  I  can  tell  you  his  death  was  like  a  new  life 


174  TUE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

to  me,  for  it  was  an  unmistakable  relief  and  restoration  of 
liberty  and  personal  safety." 

According  to  herself,  Lady  Rolle  had  made  the  most  of 
it,  after  the  fashion  of  King  Solomon.     She  too  had  reigned 
like  a  queen  for  a  season,  had  said  to  herself,  "  Lo,  I  am 
come  to  great  estate,"  and  in  her  goodliness  of  person,  in 
her  wit,  rank,  and  wealth,  had  given  her  heart  to  know 
wisdom  and  to  know  madness  and  folly.     She  too  had  made 
her  great  works,  builded  her  houses,  got  her  servants,  her 
men-singers  and  her  women-singers,  and  was  great  and  in- 
creased more  than  all  that  were  before  her,  and  whatsoever 
her  eyes  desired  she  kept  not  from  them,  and  withheld  not 
her  heart  from  any  joy.     With  the  same  inevitable  result, 
too,  she  had  looked  at  last  on  all  the  works  that  her  hands 
had  wrought,  and  on  the  labor  that  she  had  labored  to  do, 
and  came  now  and  told  of  it  in  the  spring  garden.     And 
her  hearer  was  an  aged  widow,  who  had  "been  oppressed 
and  afflicted,  who  had  been  brought  up  in  the  wilderness, 
and  was  to  make  her  grave  among  strangers,  and  who  was 
yet  sunning  herself  in  the  light  of  God's'bounty  and  faith- 
fulness, and  taking  pleasure  in  the  daisies,  the  lambs,  and 
her  child  Yolande,  and  thinking  pleasantly  of  the  heaven 
where  the  river  was  a  water  of  life,  the  leaves  of  the  tree 
for  the  healing  of  the  nations,  and  where  there  was  a  lamb 
like  as  it  had  been  slain.     And  behold  that  other  woman, 
forty  years  younger,  who  had  dwelt  among  her  own  peo- 
ple, with  her  very  sons  in  their  manhood  dependent  upon 
her  power,  and  hardly  yet  past  the  zenith  of  her  splendor, 
come  out  of  her  way  to  tell  Grand'mere  that  "  all  was  van- 
ity and  vexation  of  spirit,  and  that  there  was  no  profit 
under  the  sun." 

And  the  particular  vanity  under  which  my  lady  was  now 
writhing  had  its  root  in  him  who  should  have  been  the  be- 
ginning of  her  strength  and  the  excellency  of  her  dignity, 
and  of  whom,  in  their  mutual  failure,  she  spoke  with  her 
face  growing  livid.  She  complained  bitterly  of  the  trifling 
character  of  her  eldest  son. 

"  lie  is  so  engrossed  in  his  selfish  enjoyments — in  his 
h'orse,  his  betting,  his  gambling,  and  his  pictures,  that  he 
has  novel-  had  a  thought  to  spare  even  for  his  brothers,  not 
to  speak  of  his  mother,"  she  said.  "He  has  never  had  any 
consideration  for  me,  though  I  have  taken  care  that  he  has 


THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  175 

not  been  able  to  afford  to  quarrel  with  me.  But  now  he 
is  proceeding  to  crown  all  his  evil  doings,  and  is  laying  him- 
self out  maliciously  and  with  deep  design  to  humble  me ; 
and  you  know,  Grand'mere,  it  is  hard  to  be  humbled  by 
one's  own  son.  But  you  have  been  happier;  you  don't 
knoAV  what  that  is,  my  good  old  soul." 

"  It  is  dark  in  some  corners  though  the  sun  shines,"  said 
Grand'mere,  "but  it  is  a  heavy  burden  to  the  mother's 
heart  to  be  shut  out  from  the  son's." 

"  And  the  worst  of  it  is,"  Lady  Rolle  went  on,  intent  on 
her  own  grievances,  "  Rolle  will  never  marry,  he  is  too 
much  of  a  petit-maUve,  a  man  about  town  ;  he  could  not 
suffer  the  restraint,  the  clog  it  would  be  upon  his  actions. 
Though  he  is  selfish,  and  idle,  and  sneering,  he  can  enjoy 
good-fellowship,  and  is  welcome  wherever  he  goes.  So 
you  see,  good  mother,  it  is  the  more  necessary  that  George 
should  marry.  He  would  have  done  it  ere  now,  dangler 
and  shuffler  though  he  be,  if  I  had  not  stood  in  the  way. 
You  must  know  that  he  went  and  took  a  fancy  to  one  of 
the  Leicestershire  Lowndeses,  and  would  have  been  off  and 
married  her  all  in  a  breath,  had  I  not  stopped  all  that  very 
quickly." 

"  And  do  you  not  believe  it  is  well  for  the  young  folks 
to  marry?"  asked  Grand'mere  with  all  her  simple  earnest- 
ness. 

"  Ah  !  yes  surely,"  said  my  lady,  "  but  we  have  learned, 
among  other  things  from  France,  that  the  parents  should 
have  some  say  in  that  matter.  I  have  an  old  score  against 
these  Lowndeses,  and  that's  not  the  way  I  wish  to  clear  it 
off.  The  mother  of  Gatty  Lowndes  once  slandered  and  in- 
jured me,  and  my  son  shall  not  marry  Gatty  Lowndes,  even 
though  she  was  fairer  than  I  was,  a  greater  fortune,  and  in 
every  other  respect  a  vast  deal  too  good  for  him.  I  tell 
you  I  would  sooner  give  him  over  to  the  bailiffs ;  for  I 
might  do  the  minx  an  injury  if  she  were  so  silly  as  to  come 
within  my  reach.  Rolle  knew  my  mind  about  that  too,  and 
yet  he  had  the  face  to  go  and  be  a  party  to  it  secretly,  in 
order  to  punish  and  affront  his  own  mother.  And  they 
have  laid  a  deep  scheme.  The  Lowndeses  are  at  Tun- 
bridge,  and  Rolle  has  taken  rooms  for  himself  on  tire  Parade 
there,  and  he  wishes  George  to  join  him,  though  in  general 
the  one  suits  the  other  very  much  as  my  cat  Fatima  suits 


176  THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

the  clog  Fluff.  But  I  smelled  the  rat,  and  I  shall  yet  get  the 
better  of  both  the  wretches ;  I  shall  see  them  undone  at 
any  sacrifice,  even  if  I  have  to  marry  George  to  a  ballet- 
dancer  or  the  daughter  of  a  chimney-sweep." 

"Ah!  but  surely  they  will  listen  to  their  mother's  word 
at  the  last,  to  save  her  from  pain,"  said  Grand'mere,  in  a 
hopeful  tone. 

"  They  will  listen  when  they  are  outwitted  and  befooled," 
said  Lady  Rolle ;  "  but  you  must  aid  me  in  this,  Grand'- 
mere, and  lend  me  Miss  Pendry ;  it  would  be  no  loss  to  you 
to  oblige  me  in  this  business.  George  often  noticed^  little 
Dupuy,  and  in  his  own  lazy  way  spoke  of  her  approvingly. 
He  was  greatly  tickled  by  her  running  away,  and  _  even 
wished  that  he  might  catch  her  and  tame  her.  But  if  Yo- 
lande  were  carried  to  the  Wells — as  I  would  do  with  your 
consent — a  truce  to  your  thanks — and  brought  into  contact 
with  George  in  private,  and  at  the  rooms,  in  such  a  way  as 
would  not  be  the  least  ungenteel  to  the  girl,  George,  who 
is  so  vain  that  any  body  could  flatter  his  vanity  to  the  top 
of  his  bent,  might  be  fooled  into  the  rash  and  reckless  step 
of  marrying  an  obscure  girl,  if  she  played  her  cards  well. 
And  I  myself  would  teach  the  chit  how  to  do  this ;  while 
all  the  time  George  would  judge,  as  he  had  every  reason, 
that  his  mother  would  be  furious  at  the  mesalliance.  And 
I  confess  to  you,  Grand'mere,  I  have  always  lived  in  dread 
of  such  a  marriage  by  means  of  a  curtain  ring,  and  Hoadley 
or  some  hedge  priest.  The  marriage  once  over,  however, 
Rolle  would  be  got  the  better  of;  Gatty  Lowndes  would 
be  thrown  out,  and  Yolandc  Dupuy  would  be  young  Mis- 
tress Rolle— Lady  Rolle,  in  her  turn  ;  and  not  even  her 
present  ladyship's  self,  however  much  she  might  regret  her 
desperate  quits,  would  be  able  to  tamper  with  them." 

"  Madam  !" — gasped,  Grand'mere,  flushing  with  the  scant 
blood  of  fourscore,  and'  hot  and  trembling  even  in  the  fresh 
spring  day  among  her  flowers  and  leaves — "  is  thy  servant 
a  dog,  that  she  should  do  such  a  thing  ?" 

"But,  my  dear  old  woman,  you  are  clean  mistaken," 
argued  Lady  Rolle,  mystified,  with  all  her  quick  wit,  at  the 
quiver  of  indignation  with  which  her  condescension  was 
received,  and  not  refraining  from  stamping  her  foot  at  such 
an  unexpected  obstacle  to  her  mad  will.  "The  child,  as 
one  of  us,  would  be  completely  sheltered  from  blame  and 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  177 

exposure.  The  fact  is,  madam,  when  we  can  not  get  rid  of 
her,  we  must  make  the  best  of  her.  I  dare  say  I  should  be 
forced  to  do  as  much  in  the  end  by  Gatty  Lowndes,  sup- 
posing I  could  not  shake  her  off,  and  if  I  did  not  pinch  her 
black  and  blue,  or  push  her  down  stairs  on  our  first  intro- 
duction— and  I  am  only  a  woman — and  Rolle  himself  is  one 
of  the  first  gentlemen  in  England,  and  a  nobleman.  You 
forget — sure,  you  forget,  Grand'mere." 

"  I  forget  not — I  shall  never  forget,  to  my  shame  and 
sorrow.  What  enormity  have  I  committed  that  a  woman 
such  as  you  should  ask  me  to  betray  the  child  of  the  saints 
and  martyrs  of  the  galleys  ?  The  Bourbons  are  good  no- 
bility, but  there  are  better — my  own  dear  little  one,  so 
obedient,  loving,  and  confiding!"  cried  Grand'mere,  tried 
even  beyond  her  patience,  and  weeping,  and  wringing  her 
hands,  and  shaking  as  if  she  had  seen  a  spectre,  because  she 
had  been  taken  unawares  in  the  credulity  of  her  faith. 

Lady  Rolle  stared,  gathered  up  her  train,  and  said — 

"I  make  you  a  thousand  apologies.  I  thought  that  I  had 
heard  of  such  things  as  manages  cle  convenance,  and  all 
that ;  I  must  have  been  wrong  advised,  but,  as  I  said  be- 
fore, I  fancied  the  good  fashion,  like  the  getting  rid  of  the 
bantlings,  came  from  France." 

"  Whatever  you  may  have  heard,  madamc,"  protested 
Grand'mere,  in  sad  and  solemn  earnest,  "  whatever  wrong 
tnariages  de  convenance  may  have  to  answer  for,  no  honest, 
righteous  man  or  woman  in  France,  or  out  of  it,  has  ever 
employed  the  parental  authority  and  the  right  of  choice  to 
accomplish  a  villainous  barter  and  fraud." 

Lady  Rolle  stared  once  more  with  flaming  eyes,  and 
flounced  with  stately  step  out  of  the  arbor.  She  never 
sought  Grand'mere,  and  never  spoke  to  her  again  ;  only  once 
more  in  all  their  lives  did  she  address  her,  and  that  was  in 
two  written  lines. 


CHAPTER  XVI. 

THE  SEDGE  POND  SORE  THROAT. — Till-:  WHITE  CRUSADE. 

Thus  there  was  reprieve  to  Tolande  from  the  craft  and 
force  of  the  offended  quality.  The  Rolles  quitted  the  cas- 
tle for  Tunbridge  in  coaches  and  six,  chariots,  and  wagons, 

H2 


178  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

exporting,  as  they  had  imported,  the  surfeit  of  self-indul- 
gence, the  icy  glitter  of  wordly  wit,  and  the  furious  conten- 
tions of  unbridled  wills.  Mr.  Hoadley  alone  remained  be- 
hind, like  a  crow  in  the  mist,  to  pursue  some  researches  in  the 
castle  library  for  my  lord,  who  was  not  disinclined  to  have 
a  reputation  for  scholarship  acquired  at  second-hand.  The 
chaplain  cheered  his  solitude  by  cultivating  the  friendship 
of  the  good  women  of  the  Shottery  Cottage,  until  Madame 
herself  thawed  a  little  toward  the  young  man,  who  listened 
so  respectfully  to  her  diatribes.  Yolande,  in  her  girlish  se- 
verity, ceased  to  despise  the  weak  young  chaplain,  whose 
weakness  was  no  longer  apparent  in  his  fretful  murmurs 
against  his  patrons  and  his  slavish  submission  to  them. 

Dolly  and  Milly  Rolle  felt  it  a  dreadful  change  to  be 
thrown  back  on  their  old,  idle  home-life  at  the  rectory,  Lady 
Rolle  not  having  invited  either  of  them,  as  they  had  fondly 
hoped,  to  pass  the  season  with  her  at  the  Wells  and  in  town. 
And  though  luckily  no  little  bird  whispered  to  their  caps 
the  proposal  which  had  so  enraged  Grand'ruere,  the  great 
lady,  while  she  could  not  offend,  had  grievously  disappoint- 
ed them. 

In  their  extreme  ennui,  the  rectory  girls  were  so  ill-off 
for  social  intercourse,  that  they  set  about  taking  up  Yo- 
lande and  the  old  Madame  at  the  Shottery  Cottage  again. 
They  were  the  more  led  to  this  perhaps  that  Mr.  Hordley 
had  taken  them  up,  though  he  hardly  ever  came  to  the 
rectory,  and  theu  only  to  sit  with  their  papa  in  his  study, 
and  to  go  back  like  a  whining  school-boy  to  his  tasks.  Then 
their  papa  would  come  into  the  parlor,  and  say  to  Madam, 
their  mother,  in  their  hearing — 

"My  life,  what  a  contrast  there  is  between  this  foolish 
young  jackanapes  and  our  manly  Philip  !  Was  that  one  of 
the  reasons  of  the  boy's  going  so  soon  ?  AVas  he  early  ripe, 
and  needed  no  growing  old  ?" 

And  Madam  would  wipe  her  eyes,  and  answer  meek- 
ly- 

"  His  Father  knows  best." 

But  whining  school-boy  and  foolish  jackanapes  though  he 
was,  Mr.  Hoadley's  face  was  worth  seeing,  when  all  the  fine 
folk  were  gone,  and  there  was  no  other  face  to  see.  Mr. 
Hoadley  was  always  least  lackadaisical,  and  most  sensible 
and  spirited  when  beside  Grand'mere,  though  Grand'mere's 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  179 

presence  involved  that  of  Yolande,  to  whom  the  crack-brain- 
ed fellow  affected  to  pay  a  sort  of  moon-struck,  distant  court, 
because  he  wanted  a  subject  for  his  poor  verses.  The 
girls  could  see  that  with  half  an  eye  ;  and  little  Dupuy  (the 
rectory  girls  had  borrowed  the  term,  along  with  many  a 
worse  trick,  from  the  castle)  was  a  simpleton  and  a  hypo- 
crite to  permit  it. 

In  one  respect  Yolande  would  not  allow  herself  to  be 
taken  up  by  Dolly  and  Milly  again;  but  as  Grand'mere 
said — 

"  What  will  you  ?  While  we  are  in  the  world  we  must 
have  neighbors,  and  we  must  love  our  neighbors  and  be 
at  peace  with  them,  and  make  the  best  of  them,  covering 
over  their  faults,  condoning  their  offenses,  and  accepting 
their  advances  when  they  choose  to  make  them — that  is,  in 
so  far  as  integrity  and  self-respect  permit,  for  we  may  not 
attempt  the  destructive  impossibility  of  paying  equal  regard 
to  truth  and  falsehood,  and  loving  with  the  same  tepid,  in- 
discriminating  love,  friends  real  and  counterfeit,  indiffer- 
ent strangers  and  actual  foes.  But  they  and  we  must 
struggle  to  live  together  in  the  faint  reflection  of  the  divine 
benevolence." 

No  one  was  so  quick  to  recognize  this  truth  as  Grand'- 
mere. She  therefore  received  and  welcomed  back  the  pas- 
tor's daughters,  though  she  was  not  blind  to  their  fickleness 
and  did  not  think  the  ignorant,  conceited,  flippant  girls  im- 
proved by  their  temporary  association  with  the  Eolle  fam- 
ily. Where  would  be  the  chance  of  the  improvement  of 
such  as  they,  if  the  old,  the  wise,  the  better-gifted  and 
taught,  all  took  the  pet  at  them,  and  cast  off'  the  poor, 
crawling,  fluttering  butterflies  on  the  least  provocation,  and 
did  not  see  and  acknowledge  in  them,  as  in  every  other  hu- 
man being,  the  glorious  promise  of  infinitely  better  and  no- 
bler things — a  transformation  such  as  the  grub  to  the  butter- 
fly is  but  poor  in  comparison  with? 

The  summer  was  hot,  and  from  the  slow  river  and  the 
water  standing  in  more  than  one  slimy  pond  on  the  borders 
of  the  Waiiste,  a  yellow  mist  rose  and  hovered  over  the  vil- 
lage. Grand'mere  remarked  it,  and  pointed  it  out  gravely 
to  Yolande. 

"It  is  the  incense  of  the  devil,  which  ascends  :is  from  the 
sulphur  and  brimstone  wrecks  of  whole  burnt-offerings  of 


180  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

sloth  and  sin.  Watch  and  pray,  my  little  one,  that  it  may 
be  changed  into  the  sweet  savor  of  God,  which  comes  from 
heroic  souls  going  down  into  the  depths  to  save  their  breth- 
ren." 

The  rector  had  seen  it  before,  and  knew  it  too  well.  He 
therefore  made  preparations  for  it  by  arranging  to  send 
away  his  womenkind  to  cousins  of  his  on  the  east  coast ;  on 
learning  which  arrangement  Dolly  and  Milly  literally  jump- 
ed for  joy.  Of  what  good  were  his  timid,  formal  Madam, 
and  his  silly  lasses  in  a  calamity?  They  could  only  hang 
upon  him  and  harass  him. 

Old  Caleb  Gage,  too,  had  the  sign  pointed  out  to  him  by 
his  friend  the  doctor  in  Reedham,  and  had  his  orphanage 
and  his  infirmary  set  in  order.  He  added  to  his  prayers 
every  night  an  extra  petition — that  men  might  learn  wisdom 
from  chastisement,  and  that  laborers  might  be  sent  for  that 
harvest  which  grows  white  in  a  day — that  harvest  of  life-in- 
death  which  is  unspeakably  precious  and  unspeakably  awful 
in  its  supernatural  growth  and  perfection.  All  the  while  the 
old  squire  talked  more  to  young  Caleb  than  he  had  ever  done 
before,  of  the  first  Caleb  Gage,  who  had  driven  the  earliest 
plough  into  the  wide  Waaste,  which  then  extended  from 
Sedge  Pond  to  Reedham,  and  how  men  had  the  wilderness 
earth  given  them  to  make  it  into  a  great  garden  of  Eden. 
Young  Caleb,  he  urged,  should  do  this  part  of  the  great  com- 
mission ;  but  he  would  at  once  set  about  raising  money  by 
mortgage  for  the  work.  lie  took  shame  to  himself  that  he 
had  always  postponed  the  draining,  trenching,  quarrying, 
and  building  operations  on  the  estate  till  the  time  when  his 
son  should  take  possession  of  it.  But,  God  helping  him,  by 
the  next  fall  the  bringing  in  of  the  land  should  be  begun. 

Now  that  the  English  summer  was  in  its  prime,  and  so 
far  admitted  indulgence  in  southern  habits,  Grand'mere 
loved  best  to  take  her  meals  in  the  open  air.  The  rude  vil- 
lagers, spying  through  the  garden-gate,  or  over  the  wall, 
where  the  branches  of  a  spreading  mulberry-tree  screened 
them  from  the  party  within,  could  see  a  table  set  in  the  cot- 
tage porch,  or  in  the  arbor  where  cream-colored  roses,  in 
clusters,  drooping  with  their  own  weight,  had  taken  the 
place  of  the  cold,  blue-grey,  scentless  periwinkles.  There 
were  bronzed,  shining  beetles  and  earwigs  in  the  roses,  but 
Grand'mere  could  never  dissever  these  insects  from  the  rest 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  181 

of  God's  creatures,  and  so  she  only  brushed  them  softly 
away  while  Dolly  and  Milly  screeched  at  the  sight  of  them, 
and  stamped  the  lives  out  of  them  with  their  high-heeled 
shoes.  When  it  was  any  body's  fete — and  Grand'mere  held 
that  every  body  must  have  a  fete,  and  that  they  and  their 
friends  were  bound  to  celebrate  it — Mr.  Hoadlcy  would  have 
his  flageolet,  on  which  he  could  play  fairly,  and  the  girls 
would  sing  by  turns  with  their  simple  skill,  and  Grand'mere 
would  be  as  gay  as  a  girl  of  twenty.  When  it  was  Grand'- 
mere's  own  fete,  Monsieur  joined  for  once  in  the  gayety, 
and  uncorked  the  Medoc ;  and  Madame,  sombre  under  cen- 
turies of  party  spirit  and  sectarian  wrong,  fried  the  chickens 
and  smipoudrait  the  strawberries,  and  looked  on  without  a 
particle  of  offense  at  the  little  Mother's  happiness  ;  while 
big  Prie  waited  stumpily,  in  a  wonderful  neckerchief  and 
hood,  in  token  that  she  was  in  the  open  air,  and  was  a  Brit- 
ish islander. 

But  one  day  in  June  the  weather  was  so  oppressive,  that 
Grand'mere  and  her  children  were  forced  to  abide  languid- 
ly in  the  darkest  corners  of  the  parlor,  though  the  villagers 
of  Sedge  Pond,  condemned  to  work  for  their  daily  bread, 
were  out  making  hay  in  the  meadows  by  the  river,  as  they 
had  been  all  the  week.  She  had  lamented  the  obligation  of 
the  hay-making  twenty  times  that  day,  and,  taking  the  ex- 
posure of  the  people  to  heart,  had  been  heavy  over  it  in  a 
way  not  customary  with  her.  Yolande  was  almost  thankful 
that  Grand'mere  must  have  forgotten  the  poor  laborers, 
when  the  old  woman  broke  a  pause  by  exclaiming  ab- 
ruptly— 

"  Oh,  that  we  had  the  thunder,  though  the  peals  split  the 
stones,  and  the  showers,  though  it  rained  horned  cattle." 

"  La  !  how  can  you  wish  such  horrid  things  ?"  protested 
Dolly  Rollc  ;  "Milly  and  me  are  main  frightened  at  thun- 
der ;  we  should  go  into  fits  at  the  first  crack." 

"  Oh,jioja!"  Grand'mere  put  her  off  a  little  impatiently, 
"  I  should  engage  to  bring  you  out  of  them  again.  I  should 
bear  all  your  maladies  on  the  thumb — at  least,  I  hope  so,  my 
dears.  If  Ave  had  the  thunder  and  the  showers,  they  might 
not  be  too  late  to  cool  and  wash  the  reeking,  engrained 
earth." 

"  Why,  madam,  wherc's  the  reek  and  the  engrainedness?" 
demanded  the  Holies,  pouting ;  "  we  never  thought  to  hear 


182  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

you  call  the  place  such  shocking  bad  names  as  it  puts  us  in 
a  twitter  to  hear.  The  village  smells,  as  it  does  in  summer 
mostly,  but  what  of  that  ?" 

"  Pho !  pho !  my  good  lady,  your  imagination  or  your 
nerves  are  running  away  with  you,"  even  Mr.  Hoadley  remon- 
strated. "  Haven't  you  felt  heat  before,  and  what  it  breeds 
in  a  sluttish  village  ?  I  own  I  am  too  much  of  a  slave  to 
my  nose,  but  I  could  not  quite  reconcile  myself  to  wishing 
for  a  thunder-storm,  not  even  though  we  have  to  thank  the 
great  Mr.  Pope  for  one  incident  in  a  storm  which  is  very 
pretty,"  he  ended,  with  a  profound  sigh,  wasted  like  his  al- 
lusion, which  nobody  present  comprehended. 

"  I  tell  you  what  is  worse  than  the  heat  or  even  than  the 
thunder,"  announced  Milly  Rolle,  sapiently ;  "  it  is  these 
poor  folks  sending  tor  our  papa  every  time  they  are  taken 
with  their  infectious  disorders,  as  if  there  was  no  chance  of 
his  being  taken  with  them,  and  every  other  body  at  the 
rectory,  and  no  end  to  the  pother.  I  declare  I  think  it  is 
monstrous  silly  and  unkind  in  them,  after  all  our  papa  has 
done  for  them,  and  the  doles  which  we  dispense  at  Christmas 
and  at  Easter,  though  they  are  common  villagers  and  do 
not  know  how  to  behave  genteel  to  us.  What  do  you  say, 
Mr.  Hoadley  ? — would  you  read  prayers  to  them  ?" 

"  I  would  if  I  were  asked,  miss,"  answered  the  young 
man,  coloring  and  hesitating  for  a  moment,  but  speaking  at 
last  with  decision,  and  in  forgetfulness  of  the  great  Mr.  Pope 
and  his  moving  incident. 

"  To  the  hangman  with  being  asked  !"  cried «Grand'ruere, 
excitedly;  "who  suffers  in  the  village?  What  is  the  mal- 
ady ?" 

"How  should  we  know?"  Dolly  and  Milly  Rolle  thus 
excused  themselves  in  a  breath  from  any  farther  acquaint- 
ance with  disagreeable  facts.  "  We'd  have  the  dumps  in 
no  time  if  we  took  up  our  heads  with  whoever  was  laid 
down.  Besides,  we're  to  set  out  this  day  se'ennight ;  we 
are  up  to  our  eyes  in  business,  and  have  only  come  out  for 
an  airing.  Yes,  indeed,  Grand'mere,  you  may  believe  us  or 
not,  but  we've  to  spur  on  Patty  Brierley  to  finish  our  tam- 
bored  gowns  in  time.  We've  to  keep  our  mother  in  mind 
of  all  the  clothes  we  must  take  with  us,  and  we've  to  ride 
with  Black  Jasper  to  Reedham  for  what  the  packman  forgot 
at  his  last  call.     It  was  only  by  chance  that  we  learned  that 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  183 

there  had  been  as  good  as  three  or  four  messages  for  our 
papa  to  attend  sick-beds  yesterday,  and  Doll  was  on  the 
steps  just  before  we  came  out,  and  heard  another  delivered 
about  Mother  Pott,  who  had  been  brought  in  from  the  hay- 
cocks with  her  throat  as  bad  and  her  head  as  lischt  as  the 
rest. 

"Ah  !"  said  Grand'inere,  "  the  thief  discovers  himself,  and 
he  is  an  old  enemy  ;"  and  she  named  an  epidemic  which  was 
then  called  putrid  fever,  that  broke  out  in  England  toward 
the  close  of  the  last  century,  and  mowed  down  whole  fam- 
ilies of  the  nobility  as  well  as  of  their  vilely-housed  farm- 
laborers.  "  \Ve  must  do  what  we  can  to  arrest  the  terrible 
thief.  I  have  met  him  before,  and  struggled  to  take  his 
booty  from  him — alas!  not  always  with  success.  Now  who 
is  with  me  to  cry  '  stop  thief,'  and  do  what  the  good  God 
wills  to  snatch  from  the  villain  the  living  prey  which,  ah ! 
the  ?nisere,  is  delivered  gagged  and  bound  into  his  greedy 
clutches?" 

At  that  moment  the  dismal  sound  of  the  passing  bell  stole 
out  with  a  sullen  clangor  on  the  thick  and  loaded  air.  The 
Rolles  fell  back  with  their  fingers  in  their  ears,  but  before 
the  first  dull  vibration  had  ceased,  "  I'm  with  you,  Grand'- 
mere," said  Yolande,with  a  swelling  breast  and  shining  eyes. 

"  Oh  !  dear,  what  has  come  to  you  Dupuys  ?"  complained 
the  Rolles,  in  shrill  discomfiture  and  exasperation.  "  You 
don't  mean  to  tell  us  that  you  are  so  crazy  as  to  wait  upon 
the  poor  bodies  that  are  sick  ?  A  fig  for  them,  if  that  is  to 
be  the  way  of  it,  for  we  can't  come  here  again  for  any  more 
confabs  if  you  go  near  stricken  persons,  Ave  promise  you 
that;  and  little  Dupuy,  who  gives  herself  the  airs  of  a  prin- 
cess or  a  nun,  will  never  make  so  bold,  and  be  so  free.  We 
were  told  the  people  themselves  shut  the  doors  in  each 
other's  faces,  and  won't  lend  a  hand  to  nurse  the  living  or 
bury  the  dead.  And  you  are  not  clergy — no,  nor  even  doc- 
tors." 

"Pardon,"  said  Grand'inere,  rising  to  the  occasion,  and 
speaking  quite  cheerily,  "  every  woman  finds  herself  a  little 
of  the  ono  and  a  little  of  the  other  so  soon  as  she  is  tried,  or 
she  is  no  true  woman  and  handmaid  of  the  Great  Physician 
and  Heavenly  Priest.  Besides,  we  have  had  the  gift  of  the 
knowledge  of  herbs  in  our  family  since  Bernardo  Komilly 
stanched  the  wounds  of  the  Conde.     Have  I  never  told 


184  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

you  that  ?  If  the  rest  of  the  village  shut  the  door,  the 
better  reason  that  I  an  old  woman  should  open  and  enter 
where  fear  and  pain  are  all  the  company.  De  grace,  they  will 
not  keep  me  out  now." 

"  Madame,"  said  Mr.  Hoadley,  in  great  excitement,  "  I 
have  not  spoken,  but  I  trust  that  you  do  not  doubt  I  am 
your  servant,  to  go  on  whatever  errand  you  like  to  send  me 
among  the  poor.  If  it  become  your  gown,  all  the  more 
must  it  become  my  cloth.  I  cry  Heaven's  mercy  and  yours 
that  I  have  not  seen  it  so  before,  and  I  am  thankful  that  my 
patrons  are  not  here  to  forbid  me  doing  my  duty  when  my 
eyes  are  open.  But,  my  dear  old  Madame,  you  are  not  so 
reckless  as  to  run  so  frightful  a  risk  as  permit  another  and 
altogether  unsuitable  attendant — though  the  Bible  has  rec- 
ords  of  ministering  angels,"  ended  the  chaplain, hurriedly, 
with  a  signifiant  glance  at  Yolande,  who  accepted  the  impli- 
cation and  repudiated  the  objection  with  the  coolest  indif- 
ference, if  not  the  liveliest  indignation. 

"Monsieur,  Grand'mere  and  I  never  part.  If  there  is  a 
task  which  she,  old  and  feeble  as  she  is,  can  undertake,  why 
should  I,  who  am  young  and  strong,  not  be  capable  of  it  ? 
If  the  question  is  one  of  worthiness  and  unworthiness,  I  com- 
prehend Monsieur ;  but  if  not,  I  do  not  comprehend  at  all. 
But,  young  girl  as  I  am,  Mr.  Hoadley,  Grand'mere  thinks 
me  neither  too  bad  nor  too  foolish  to  work  with  her  in 
nursing  the  sick  and  serving  God,  who  will  pardon  my  un- 
worthiness, and  teach  and  help  my  weakness  and  folly." 

Poor  Mr.  Hoadley  was  confounded. 

But  Grand'mere  was  not  so  hard  upon  Mr.  Hoadley  and 
his  motives  ;  her  days  of  girlish  severity  aud  sauciness  had 
long  been  past,  yet  she,  too,  was  against  him. 

"  My  friend,  you  do  not  know  the  French.  Vincent  de 
Paul  introduced  another  fashion  among  us  an  age  ago. 
There  are  girls  by  hundreds  no  older  than  Yolande  among 
the  Sisters  of  Charity  and  the  Sisters  of  Mercy.  The  peas- 
ants began  to  shame  the  nobles.  We  are  only  bourgeoisie, 
but  the  nobles  shamed  the  peasants  and  us  by  forming  the 
beguines  of  Bruxelles ;  and  there  is  many  a  noble  girl  in 
Vincent  de  Paul's  blessed  family  at  this  hour.  Assuredly, 
though  we  are  Huguenots,  and  sing  each  year  on  the  anni- 
versary of  the  Revocation,  '  By  Babel's  streams  we  sat  and 
wept,'  yet  we  are  not  lost  to  charity,  and  we  fear  not  for  our 


THE   IIUGUENOT   FAMILY.  185 

daughters,  though  their  vows  are  silent  and  secret,  and 
known  only  to  themselves  and  their  God.  Go  !  there  is 
nothing  to  fear.  Can  we  best  keep  off  the  wolf  by  flying 
from  him,  or  by  going  to  meet  him,  hatchet  in  hand?  As 
for  the  contagion  and  Jhe  infection,  I  know  them  not,  save 
as  being  still  the  finger  and  the  breath  of  the  living  God 
that  only  reach  as  he  wills.  No  journeys,  no  closed  doors 
and  bolted  windows,  will  chase  them  away  any  more  than 
they  will  chase  away  death.  Truly,  we  want  swift  feet  and 
iron  barriers  to  escape  from  the  King  of  Terrors,  my  son ; 
and  I  have  never  heard  that  he  strikes  the  sister,  the  doctor, 
or  the  priest  more  than  another.  When  he  does,"  added 
Grand'mere,  quailing  a  little,  not  for  herself,  but  as  she  felt 
the  contact  of  Yolande's  warm  young  hand  with  her  own 
chill  and  withered  one,  "  some  men  and  women  ought  to 
be  the  bravest  of  the  brave ;  some  soldiers  ought  to  lead  the 
van,  and  God  be  praised,  the  French  women  are  brave. 
Have  you  not  heard  of  our  heroic  cantini&res?  Neverthe- 
less, I  shall  not  take  my  young  recruit  into  the  battle  with- 
out her  father's  and  mother's  consent." 

Madame  came  forward  on  the  spot.  She  did  not  know 
what  the  bruit  was  about,  or  why  Grand'mere  should  act 
the  good  marquise  or  baronne  to  the  strange  country  peo- 
ple. But  without  doubt,  if  she  chose  to  do  so,  Yolancle 
should  help  her.  She  should  die  with  vexation  and  shame 
at  the  idea  of  sparing  a  child  of  hers  when  the  old  mother 
made  the  venture.  As  to  danger  and  to  death,  they  were 
old  comrades  of  the  Huguenots,  who  knew  what  heavenly 
treasures  and  indestructible  jewels  to  snatch  from  them. 

"Thou  good  Philippine!''  exclaimed  Grand'mere,  with 
.enthusiasm.     "She   has   hands   like  that!  our  Philippine. 
She  can  make  a  salad;  she  can  make  a  cataplasme!    We 
are  betes  beside  her  when  she  throws  her  sonl  into  the  oil- 
cruet,  the  camomile  bouquet." 

But  no  ;  Madame's  Christian  charity  was  only  for  Grand'- 
mere and  the  Huguenots:  it  began  and  ended  with  them, 
and  by  no  means  "extended  to  perfidious  strangers,  English 
and  Lutheran.  All  the  worse  for  Madame,  since  from  this 
time  when  she  sent  off  Grand'mere  ami  Yolande  on  their 
universal  mission,  and  refused  to  have  part  or  lot  in  the  mat- 
ter, the  sternness  and  narrowness  of  her  galled  spirit  fetter- 
ed and  cramped  her  tenfold. 


186  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMTLY. 

"  Hey-day  !"  Dolly  aud  Milly  had  been  forced  to  utter,  in 
final  protest ;  "  you're  all  mad  together  at  the  Shottery  Cot- 
tage this  afternoon — as  mad  as  the  Methodies  and  the  Bed- 
lamites. And  since  Parson  Hoadley  is  smitten,  we  can  not 
be  too  glad  that  we're  a-going,  lest  we  should  be  the  next ; 
though  we  were  never  used  to  vagaries,  nor  brought  up  to 
them." 

And  thus  Grand'mere  at  last  found  an  entrance  to  the 
people,  and  Madame  Rougeole  once  more  tapped  her  way, 
and  rested  confidingly  by  sick-beds.  Mother  Pott  was  the 
first  whom  she  visited.  She  found  the  door  shut  and  the 
window  stuffed  with  rags.  In  the  stifling  darkness  the  wom- 
an's children,  already  ranged  in  a  ragged  row,  were  wailing 
like  mourners  hired  for  a  wake.  They  had  a  dim  notion  of 
comforting  and  paying  respect  to  their  poor  mother,  who 
had  toiled  for  them  like  a  beast  of  burden,  and  borne  them 
on  her  rough  but  sound  and  gallant  heart,  even  when  she 
"  melled"  them  and  "  flyted"  over  them.  Deb  was  clanking 
about  in  her  haymaker's  hat  and  clogs,  the  last  put  on  for 
the  house-floor,  as  "  t'were  aye  weet  a  bit,  unless  the  weath- 
er were  main  dry  for  a  long  spell ;"  and  telling  the  little 
ones  in  solemn  seriousness,  and  with  a  rude  pathos,  to  sob 
away,  and  not  bide  to  seek  t'supper,  for  a  craving  stomach 
were  one  thing  and  an  orphant  hap-another.  Sure  they  'ud 
get  more  suppers  if  they  tramped  and  begged  for  them ; 
but  no  tramping,  and  no  begging,  and  no  working  would 
get  them  more  mothers.  A  middle-aged,  weak-minded 
neighbor,  as  uncouth  as  Deborah,  was  holding  down  Mother 
Pott's  gaunt  arms,  which  were  instinctively  struggling  to 
tear  off  the  old  clothes  heaped  upon  her,  and  to  raise  her 
tossing  head  and  swollen  purple  face,  that  she  might  not  be 
suffocated  in  the  first  stage  of  her  disease. 

"Don't'ee,  now,  don't'ee,"  the  neighbor  was  enjoining 
plainly,  "  or  a'll  have  to  slap  and  punch'ee.  There's  nought 
but  the  sweat  for'ee.  What  ud'ee  hold  up  t'heed  like  a  hen 
going  to  drink  for?  Heed  mini  be  happed,  t'must,  lass. 
Nobut  t'hour's  come,  Mother  Pott,  and  ee'll  gang,  but  a'd 
have'ee  to  gang  peaceably,  and  not  like  an  ill-doer.  Ee's 
been  nash  all  thy  life,  'ooman ;  'ee  might  take  a  telling  in 
the  end,  and  show  'ee  can  behave  sen  afore  the  childrer  i'  t' 
deed-thraw." 

Deb  made  such  an  outcry  when  she  saw  Grand'mere,  with 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  187 

Yolande  at  her  back,  that  even  the  sick  woman's  ears,  filled 
by  the  wild  music  of  delirium,  were  pierced  by  the  sound, 
and  she  desisted  from  her  frantic  movements  for  a  moment, 
and  turned  her  glaring  eyes  toward  the  door. 

Had  it  not  been  that  Mr.  Hoadley  followed  Grand'mere 
and  Yolande,  and  that  Deb  recognized  him,  and  bobbed  her 
courtesy  to  him  as  being  one  of  the  gentlefolks  of  the  castle, 
she  would  have  tried  with  all  her  might — and  she  had  the 
making  of  an  Amazon  in  her — to  drive  out  Grand'mere  by 
force.  As  it  was,  she  stood  before  the  bed,  and  threw  up 
her  lank  girlish  arms  in  a  desperate  appeal. 

"  Mother,  mother,  it's  the  French  quean,  with  her  plots 
and  cantrips.  She  be  come  for  me  as  soon  as  you're  laid 
down.  Her's  a  witch,  mother,  and  her's  laid'ee  down, 
m'appen,  'cause,  if 'ee  called  me  a  burdock,  and  drubbed  me, 
'ee  kept  a  roof  aboon  my  heed  and  a  bite  in  my  mouth,  and 
brought  me  up  honest." 

Deborah  Pott  had  reason  to  remember  that  speech  long 
afterward. 

Mother  Pott's  nurse,  Sukey  Frew,  on  hearing  this,  fled, 
with  her  teeth  chattering  in  her  head,  from  the  contamina- 
tion of  foreigners  and  witchcraft  combined. 

But  Mother  Pott  herself  was  unable  to  comprehend  the 
situation,  or  to  do  more  than  raise  her  head  with  a  jerk,  and 
gabble  hoarsely  of  Deb's  being  "  a  burdock  and  a  tomboy, 
but  feether's  child,  and  a  ud  do  a's  dooty  by  her,  though  t' 
little  ones  ud  clem  for  it." 

"  Wench  !" — Mr.  Hoadley  would  have  put  aside  Deb  in- 
dignantly— "  do  you  not  know  your  betters,  when  Madame, 
heaven  preserve  her !  has  done  you  the  grace  to  come  here 
at  the  risk  of  her  life  ?" 

But  Grand'mere  interrupted  him,  beseeching,  apologizing, 
and  explaining,  as  though  it  had  been  her  who  received  the 
grace. 

"My  poor  girl,  will  you  not  permit  me  to  aid  you?  I 
ask  your  pardon  that  I  intrude  ;  I  would  never  have  done 
it,  but  for  the  extremity.  Look  you,  I  can  go  and  leave  you 
to  suffer — misericonlt ,  how  you  sutler! — if  you  will,  which 
is  your  right.  I  will  torment  you  no  more  by  my  Btrange 
looks  and  ways,  unless  you  say,  'Stay,  my  old  'Madame,' 
when  once  I  have  relieved  the  sick.  But  yes,  1  can  ease  if 
I  can  not  cure,  and  I  may  save  others.     I  pray  you,  Deborah, 


]  88  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

allow  me  at  least,  before  I  go,  to  open  the  window  and  door, 
and  give  the  sick  a  breath  of  air.  It  is  God's  air,  my  child, 
which  he  made  for  us  all,  for  high  and  low,  and  for  all  the 
beasts  of  the  field,  great  and  small,  that  you  know  and  love. 
I  am  sure  of  that.  Then  why  have  you  such  fear  of  the  good 
air — the  sweet  air  ?  The  beasts  of  the  field,  do  they  fear  it  ? 
No,  they  are  wiser — taught  by  God  their  Father  alone — 
they  drink  it  in,  they  rejoice  in  it." 

Poor  Deb  stared,  listened,  and  gave  up  all  active  opposi- 
tion, looking  like  one  spell-bound  and  fascinated. 

"  Yes,  since  Monsieur  has  held  open  the  door  and  Yolande 
unfastened  the  window,"  continued  Grand'mere,  striking 
when  the  iron  was  hot,  "  the  poor  woman  breathes  more 
softly — rests  tranquil  by  comparison.  Have  pity  upon  her ; 
she  had  pity  on  you  even  in  seeking  to  save  you  from  us, 
whom  she  knew  not — whom  she  mistook.  But  judge  for 
yourself,  Deborah ;  you  are  not  a  little  child — you  are  a  big 
girl ;  have  we  not  returned  good  for  evil  ?  No,  we  do  not 
hurt  any  one  if  we  can  help  it ;  we  only  heal,  if  we  can,  as 
you  would  do  in  your  turn,  my  girl.  Is  it  not  so  ?  Mon- 
sieur the  pastor  is  with  us  ;  he  believes  us,  and  that  would 
re-assure  mother  if  she  could  hear  and  see.  We  will  find  a 
pillow  for  her,  and  prop  up  her  head.  Make  one  of  thine 
arm,  meantime,  my  child,  until  we  can  find  another.  The 
arm  is  not  full  fleshed,  but  it  is  firm,  and  round,  and  soft 
as  the  down  compared  with  the  wooden  block ;  the  unworn 
young  arm  is  a  good  rest  for  the  worn  old  head.  Now,  we 
will  try  if  she  can  swallow  this  balsam ;  she  was  in  the  hay- 
field  so  recently  as  this  sun-rise,  poor  diligent  one,  and,  God 
willing,  she  may  hear  and  see  again." 

But  Mother  Pott  never  heard  and  saw  clearly  in  this 
world  again  ;  never  understood  distinctly,  or  knew  any 
thing  farther  than  that  her  mortal  anguish  was  alleviated,  in 
the  degree  in  which  wisdom  and  mercy  could  alleviate  it. 
By  a  twist  of  the  mind  which  was  not  without  its  moral 
beauty,  she  attributed  all  the  poor  solaces  so  unexpected 
and  unfamiliar  to  her,  to  her  step-daughter,  and  regarded 
them  as  the  recompense,  not  only  of  her  just  dealing  toward 
the  girl,  but  of  the  rating  which  she  had  administered  to  her 
heavy  handful. 

"  A's  made  a  woman  of  'ec,  Deb,"  was  her  last  broken 
murmur ;  "  and  now,  sin'ee  can  make  a  syllabus  lik©  the 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  189 

mistress  at  the  hale-'ouse,  and  read  like  pearson,  ye'll  hang 
on  a's  hands  no  longer  ;  ee's  be  no  more  a  burdock,  lass,  but 
a  new  ha'penny,  stamped  to  be  changed.  A's  miss  you,  Deb, 
a  and  the  childer." 

Five  orphans  were  transmitted  at  once  to  the  Mall  or- 
phanage ;  but  Grand'mere  took  the  stunned  and  sorrow-lad- 
en Deborah  home  to  Priscille,  and  braved  and  conquered 
the  righteous  wrath  of  that  sovereign  in  her  own  domain  at 
the  unsightly  importation. 

"  Old  Madame,"  began  Priscille,  "  I've  served  you  and  the 
family  this  score  of  years,  the  same  as  if  I  were  all  straight, 
and  you  had  not  been  furrin.  I've  nought  to  say  against  the 
furrin  ways  ;  leastways,  I've  put  up  with  them  ;  but  to  have 
a  young  hussy  and  slut  brought  under  my  nose,  and  into 
my  very  kitchen,  that  I  can't  and  won't  abide." 

"  Prie,  Prie,  the  Dord  Jesus  Christ  had  not  where  to  lay 
his  head  once  in  his  life,  and  as  this  poor  child  is  like  him  in 
that  respect,  know  you  not  that  when  you  take  her  in  you 
take  Him  ?  He  said  it  Himself.  Oh !  the  privilege,  the 
blessing  to  Shottery  Cottage,  to  me,  and  to  you,  big 
Prie !" 


CHAPTER  XVII. 

grand'mere  and  yolande  gain  allies  in  the  crusade, 
which  turns  out  to  be  for  the  deliverance  of  souls 
as  well  as  bodies. 

Mr.  Hoadley,  having  once  joined  the  crusade  to  please 
Grand'mere  and  Yolande,  remained  on  his  own  account, 
finding  it  such  a  school  of  humanity  and  divinity  as  he  had 
never  dreamed  of  in  his  University  course,  or  in  his  chaplain's 
service  at  the  castle.  The  poetaster  now  got  his  first  expe- 
rience of  nature  in  the  rough,  and  the  amateur  priest  first 
saw  and  sympathized  with  the  real  woes  and  wants  of  the 
poor.  These  woes  and  wants  suggested  the  existence  of  a 
gulf  which  startled  and  appalled  the  young  man,  and  almost 
drove  him  out  of  the  field  with  despair  at  the  thought  of 
how  long  he  had  been  a  consenting  party  to  them  by  his 
selfish  obliviousness  and  sloth.  He  blamed  himself  for  nev- 
er having  lifted  up  a  finger  to  protest  against  them  or  to 
lighten  them,  while  all  the  time  he  was  crying  out  and  be- 


190  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 


moaning  himself  for  his  patrons'  tyranny,  corruption,  and 
worldliness. 

While  the  quality  at  the  Wells  or  in  town  were  attitu- 
dinizing, swearing,  squabbling,  drinking,  and  gambling  their 
lives  away,  such  villages  as  Sedge  Pond  were  wallowing  in 
the  dregs  of  the  quality's  vices,  and  committing  brutalities 
which  would  have  shamed  the  heathen.  The  difference  be- 
tween the  practices  of  the  two  classes  was  as  Bartholomew 
Fair  to  Ranelagh.  With  the  one  there  were  matches  at 
single-stick,  wrestling,  and'boxing,  with  gouging  out  of  eyes 
into  the  bargain  ;  with  the  other,  there  were  studies  of  dress 
and  cookery,  exchanges  of  pistol-shots  and  sword  play. 

Sedge  Pond  was  rural,  but  it  was  the  reverse  of  innocent; 
its  rurality  indeed  only  seemed  to  add  grossness  to  its  guilt. 
When,  therefore,  the  summer  scourge  was  laid  on  the  inhab- 
itants, pricked  to  the  heart  by  remorse  and  dread  of  the  hell 
of  which  they  had  the  foretaste  within  them,  they  took  to 
frenzied  confession  and  abject  submission.  Mr.  Hoadlcy 
was  tempted  to  think  that  the  catalogue  of  their  misdeeds 
went  near  to  exhausting  the  Newgate  Calendar.  It  almost 
turned  him  sick  with  disgust  and  aversion  to  hear  a  hoary 
sinner  proclaiming  that  in  his  youth  he  had  committed 
highway  robbery  for  which  another  man  had  swung  in 
chains,  and  that  he  had  gone  and  looked  on  at  the  execution. 
There  were  sons  who  had  struck  mothers  in  their  blind 
fury ;  fathers  who  had  turned  out  daughters  into  the  dark- 
ness of  night.  There  were  brothers  who  had  not  ex- 
changed friendly  words  for  scores  of  years,  but  had  lived 
railing  at  and  reviling  each  other ;  while  there  were  sisters 
who  combined  to  plunder  fathers  and  mothers  on  their 
death-beds,  and  to  defraud  nephews  and  neices  while  their 
natural  protectors  were  laid  in  their  coffins.  There  were 
men  who  had  not  slept  sober  in  other  men's  remembrance, 
and  women  who  went  to  the  ale-house  tap  as  regularly  as 
the  horses  went  to  the  watering  trough.  A  wild,  dissolute 
set  of  country  people,  of  whom  the  purer-living  were  nar- 
row and  griping  as  a  vice  and  hard  as  a  stone.  The  rector 
had  done  his  best  for  them.  He  had  shown  them  the  life 
of  a  God-fearing,  righteous,  stern  man,  so  that  instead  of 
mocking  and  scoffing  at  it,  they  respected  and  shrunk  away 
from  it.  lie  had  rescued  and  trained  the  most  of  those  who 
stood  upright,  but  there  was  a  link  wanting  between  him 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  191 

and  the  reprobates ;  and  this  Avant  lay,  not  so  much  in  the 
present,  perhaps,  as  in  the  past ;  but  it  was  in  the  past  that 
the  grooves  had  been  fitted  in,  on  which  the  wheels  of  the 
pastor's  and  people's  lives  ran,  and  from  which  it  was  hard 
to  dislodge  them. 

These  were  the  men  and  women  among  whom  Grand'- 
mere  and  Yolande  went  day  after  day,  not  only  without 
fear,  but  without  loathing.  To  the  pure  all  things  are  pure, 
and  these  evangelists  and  ministrants  bore  about  with  them 
charmed  natures  as  well  as  charmed  lives. 

"How  can  you  do  it,  Madame?"  cried  Mr.  Hoadley, 
aghast  at  the  inhumanity,  brutishness,  and  villainy  which 
he  found  had  been  festering  and  smoldering  beneath  his 
steps ;  "  how  can  you  do  it,  Madame?"  he  cried,  as  Grand'- 
mere  moistened  the  lips  of  a  man  whose  wife  had  fled  out  of 
ear-shot  of  his  blasphemies,  while  Yolande  bathed  the  bra- 
zen, branded  brow  of  a  mother,  but  no  wife,  and  received 
into  her  arms  an  outcast  of  a  child. 

"  What  is  it,  my  pastor  ?  I  have  not  gone  and  preached 
to  the  spirits  that  are  in  prison  ;  yet  it  is  written  that  my 
Master  and  yours  did  this.  What  are  these  but  lost  sheep, 
fallen,  soiled,  covered  with  bruises  and  wounds  ?  And  what 
am  I,  my  Monsieur,  save  a  wandering  sheep  whom  the  Good 
Shepherd  took  pity  upon  and  brought  back  into  the  fold  ? 
There  is  but  one  heart  and  one  brain  in  humanity,  if  you 
knew  it.  You  will  know  it,  my  poor  friend,  when  your  own 
heart  is  rent  and  broken,  and  pierced  and  wrung,  and  when 
it  can  only  bleed  inwardly  for  itself,  while  outwardly  it  wipes 
its  own  tears  off  the  cheeks  of  others,  and  binds  up  its  ach- 
ing wounds  in  the  stabs  and  gashes  which  are  all  around 
it." 

"And  has  she,  too,  suffered  so  much  ?"  inquired  Mr.  Hoad- 
ley, with  a  gape  of  bewilderment,  as  he  pointed  to  Yolande. 

"Certainly  no,"  Grand'mere  corrected  him.  "She  will 
suffer  yet,  poor  little  one,  for  it  is  her  destiny.  In  waiting 
she  has  great  faith  ;  and  know  you  not,  Monsieur,  that  faith 
removes  mountains  ?" 

When  old  Caleb  Gage,  called  as  promptly  by  the  tolling 
of  the  death-bell  at  Sedge  Pond  as  a  soldier  by  the  bugle 
call,  came  across  from  the  Mall,  Mr.  Hoadley  witnessed 
another  marvel.  The  old  Methodist  entered  in  among  these 
groaning,  writhing,  cursing  men  and  women,  and  drew  aside 


192  THE   IIUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

the  curtain  which  divided  them,  not  from  hell,  but  from 
heaven.  He  showed  them  the  Prince  of  Life,  with  the  marks 
of  his  cross  upon  Him,  bending  down  from  the  Father's  right 
hand,  as  if  saying,  "Look  up,  I  have  suffered  and  travailed 
for  you ;  and  now  both  the  work  and  the  warfare  is  finish- 
ed. There  is  nothing  left  for  you  to  do  but  to  look  up. 
Only  believe,  and  your  pains  and  sorrows  and  evil  behavior 
are  all  past  and  done  with.  There  remain  for  you  but  the 
Father's  kiss,  the  best  robe,  the  ring  for  your  hand,  and  the 
shoes  for  your  feet,  for  to-day  you  shall  be  with  me  in 
Paradise." 

Caleb  Gage  knew  no  other  gospel  than  that  gospel  of 
freest,  fullest  salvation.  He  had  announced  it  along  with 
Mr.  Charles  Wesley  as  freely  and  fully  at  the  foot  of  the 
gallows-tree  at  Tyburn  as  elsewhere.  And  when  the  con- 
demned criminals  passed  one  after  the  other  to  death,  with 
strange  meltings  of  their  hardness  and  hope  dawning  in 
their  faces,  he,  too,  had  counted  the  hours  he  had  spent  with 
them  as  among  the  happiest,  most  glorious  hours  of  his  life. 

Mr.  Hoadley,  in  after  days,  declared  solemnly  that  he  had 
seen  miracles  of  ffrace  wrought  at  this  time.  Before  the 
persuasions  and  the  wrestlings  in  prayer  of  Grand'mere,  and 
the  perfect  assurance  of  Caleb  Gage,  he  had  seen  the  chief 
of  sinners  receive  the  Gospel  like  little  children  ;  the  igno- 
rant and  the  out-of-the-way  drink  in  the  glad  tidings  ;  the 
scales  fall  off  eyes  long  spiritually  blind  ;  the  dead  heart  and 
conscience  come  back  to  life  in  a  day — in  an  hour.  He  had 
seen  faces  of  every  type  of  coarseness  and  forbidding  repul- 
siveness  change  in  the  twinkling  of  an  eye,  and  wear  traits 
of  conrpunction,  gratitude,  and  devotion,  which  they  had  nev- 
er worn  before — at  least,  not  since  they  had  rested  on  moth- 
ers' bosoms  or  fathers'  knees.  Mouths  which  had  foamed 
forth  profanity  and  obscenity  when  he  first  came  within 
reach,  now  poured  forth  praises  of  God  and  blessings  of  men. 
And  although  not  all  of  those  to  whom  Grand'mere  and  Ca- 
leb Gage  came  responded  to  the  call — some  being  steeped  in 
grudging  stupidity,  rancor,  and  despair  to  the  last — yet 
enough  did  so  for  Mr.  Hoadley  to  have  witnessed  the  aw- 
fully glorious  harvest  of  life-in-dcath. 

Grand'mere,  old  Squire  Gage,  and  even  Yolandc  took  the 
scenes  to  a  certain  extent  as  matters  of  course — rejoicing  or 
sorrowful  as  they  were  moved,  but  never  thunderstruck  or 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  193 

shaken  to  the  centre  of  their  being.  But  on  Mr.  Hoadley 
the  effect  was  remarkable.  He  beheld,  wondered,  doubted, 
questioned,  and  believed.  At  last  came  an  occasion  when  he 
went  home  and  shut  himself  up  in  his  room  in  the  castle  for 
hours,  and  was  found  by  a  servant  faint  and  bathed  in  sweat, 
as  though  he  had  recovered  from  a  trance,  but  with  his  face 
bright  and  shining;  and  though  he  forbade  the  servant  to 
speak  of  it,  he  never  denied  that  he  had  returned  to  the 
world  a  new  man.  He  went  that  moment,  and  stood  by  one 
of  the  dying-beds  which  Mr.  Gage  could  not  attend  ;  he  held 
up  the  cross  which  another  had  carried,  and  the  crown  im- 
mortal aud  eternal  which  another  wore.  Thus  he  shed  light 
into  the  deep  gloom  of  a  dark  soul,  and  sped  it  to  a  realm  of 
light. 

"  There  is  nothing  worth  but  the  saving  of  souls,  Grand'- 
mere,"  vowed  the  impulsive  young  man ;  "  henceforth  I  ded- 
icate myself  to  the  work  to  which  I  was  unworthily  conse- 
crated." 

"  The  good  God  register  your  vow  in  the  archives  of 
Heaven,  my  son,  and  the  Holy  Ghost  lend  you  strength  to 
keep  it !"  exclaimed  Grand'mere,  weeping  over  him,  and 
kissing  him  on  each  cheek  as  a  son  indeed. 

"  The  Lord  will  not  forsake  the  good  work  which  He  has 
begun,"  declared  the  young  man  with  solemn  confidence. 

"  Only  remember  always,  my  friend,  that  it  is  God  and  not 
man  who  saves  souls,  that  He  saves  them  in  a  thousand  ways, 
and  that  his  ways  are  not  as  our  ways,"  Grand'mere  caution- 
ed him,  earnestly. 

Thenceforth  Mr.  Hoadley  worked  with  Grand'mere  and 
Yolande  incessantly,  was  their  right-hand  man,  their  fellow- 
soldier,  their  son  and  brother  in  the  good  fight.  Meantime, 
the  shyness  between  Squire  Gage  and  the  women  passed 
away.  It  had  been  somewhat  indefinite  and  intangible  on 
both  sides;  but  there  it  had  been,  and  only  such  common 
works  of  loving-kindness  as  they  were  now  engaged  in  could 
have  dispersed  it.  And  Squire  Gage,  seeing  the  youngpriest 
with  his  new  commissions,  which  invested  his  sensitive,  in- 
tellectual face  with  new  nobility  and  manliness,  thanked  God 
and  took  courage.  But  sometimes  he  would  sigh  for  the  Mall 
and  his  son  as  he  watched  the  young  man  and  the  girl  in  such 
constant  association.  Not  that  either  ol*  them,  above  all  the 
girl,  betrayed  much  consciousness  of  their  close  communion 

I 


194  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

in  the  engrossing  anxiety  and  interest  of  the  mortal  sickness 
and  desolation  at  Sedge  Pond.  Still,  the  squire  could  not 
help  observing  and  summing-up  Yolande's  fine  qualities — 
her  soft  touch,  her  light  foot,  her  womanly  endurance,  intel-' 
ligence,  and  resource,  as  well  as  her  buoyance  and  cheerful- 
ness under  actual  difficulties,  which  were  beginning  to  rise 
and  relieve  her  habitual  gravity.  His  eyes  would  turn  to- 
ward the  young  girl  as  she  delivered  her  report  to  Mr.  Hoad- 
ley,  as  she  entrusted  him  with  commissions,  and  took  him 
to  task  for  their  execution,  as  she  shared  with  him  the  rose- 
mary, sweet  majoram,  and  thyme,  which  were  then  held  po- 
tent against  infection  from  the  most  terrible  of  epidemics ; 
and  he  bethought  him  of  Lucy  Gage,  who  had  made  himself 
thrice  blessed,  and  sighed  over  young  Caleb's  loss. 

Young  Caleb  did  not  absent  himself  from  the  strife  be- 
tween the  great  forces  of  physical  and  moral  good  and  evil. 
Bat  he  came  ostensibly  to  support  his  father,  in  reality  to  tire 
out  his  good  horse,  and  put  his  shoulder  to  the  wheel  for 
every  one  needing  help,  doing  more  in  his  own  way  in  an 
hour  than  Mr.  Hoadley  could  do  in  three.  In  another  re- 
spect, young  Caleb  Gage  stood  dumb  before  the  chaplain,  be- 
cause the  young  squire's  turn  was  not  for  preaching  and 
teaching. 

"Though,"  he  said  one  day  to  his  father,  "  I  trust,  sir,  I 
could  do  and  die." 

But  Grand'mere's  natural  French  overture,  which  had 
proved  such  a  complete  failure  on  English  soil,  had  erected 
an  insurmountable  barrier  between  young  Caleb  and  Yo- 
lande.  The  mutual  affront  had  sunk  so  deep  that  the  breach 
was  too  wide  for  any  hope  of  its  being  repaired.  The 
young  man,  indeed,  might  look  with  a  certain  curiosity  at 
the  girl  whom,  on  their  first  introduction,  he  had  fancied  so 
proud  and  learned  as  to  look  askance  on  a  country  fellow 
like  him  ;  and  he  could  not  choose  but  admire  one  who  had 
not  her  equal  in  those  parts,  and  might  even  speculate  with 
the  faintest  instinct  of  regret  on  what  might  have  been  if 
she  had  not  been  offered  to  him.  But  now  of  course  Ma- 
demoiselle Dupuy  was  destined  for  Parson  Hoadley,  to 
•whom  he  only  took  as  yet  in  a  modified  way,  since  their 
temperaments  differed  widely,  and  in  youth  differences  of 
temperament  rarely  exist  without  corresponding  jars.  This 
was  true  without  Caleb's  having  any  suspicion  of  the  chap- 


THE    IIUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  195 

Iain's  sudden  goodness ;  he  was  too  good  and  candid  him- 
self for  that.  Nor,  thick-headed  as  he  called  himself,  would 
he  have  denied  Mr.  Iloadley's  lately  awakened  eloquence, 
for  the  young  squire  had  too  much  sense  and  feeling  not  to 
appreciate  a  natural  orator  when  he  heard  him. 

And  if  Caleb  Gage  remained  utterly  estranged  from  Yo- 
lando,  with  no  chance  whatever  of  familiar  intercourse,  the 
relations  between  him  and  Grand'mere  were  infinitely  worse. 
He  had  a  positive  pique  against  his  father's  ally  and  dear 
friend,  who  had  done  only  one  thing  to  offend  him,  and 
who,  though  she  kept  away  from  him  now  with  a  kind  of 
meek,  pathetic  dignity,  bore  him  no  ill-will  in  return.  So 
far  as  Caleb  Gage  the  younger  could  entertain  active  dis- 
like agaiust  a  woman  old  enough  to  be  his  grandmother,  he 
entertained  it  against  her.  He  said  to  himself,  as  Madam 
at  the  rectory  had  said,  on  her  first  acquaintance  with 
Grand'mere,  that  her  dress,  her  beauty,  her  sensibility,  and 
the  graphic  emphasis  which  she  could  not  help  putting 
into  most  things,  were  attributes  unbecoming  a  woman  of 
her  age  and  situation,  and  savored  of  flightiness  and  eccen- 
tricity. He  would  have  had  Grand'mere  theoretically 
clothed  in  sackcloth  and  ashes,  such  as  Madame  her  daugh- 
ter-in-law wore,  although  he  had  not  liked  Madame  Dupuy 
particularly  in  their  slight  acquaintance.  The  young  squire, 
remembering  Mr.  Fletcher  of'Madeley,  did  not  quarrel  with 
his  father  for  being  the  old  Madame's  sworn  champion. 
But  as  for  Iloadley's  veneration  and  enthusiasm  for  the  old 
Frenchwoman,  he  could  only  regard  these  as  means  to  an 
end. 

Thus  it  happened  that  when  Grand'merc's  popularity  was 
at  its  height  at  Sedge  Pond,  and  when  the  villagers  were 
murmuring  blunt  acknowledgments  of  their  offense  in  hav- 
ing rejected  her  because  of  her  foreign  nation,  and  were 
muttering  blessings  on  her  as  she  ministered  to  them,  there 
was  one  dissentient  voice.  And  it  came  from  a  quarter 
which  would  have  been  perfectly  incredible  to  Folande, 
and  which,  if  she  could  have  credited  it,  would  have  been 
apt  to  overwhelm  her  acquired  tranquillity  with  a  flood  of 
bitterness  and  doubts  of  her  kind. 

The  rector  was  at  his  post  without  fail,  and  met  the  work- 
ers in  his  parish  at  every  corner.  He  took  their  service 
more  patiently  than  he  was  wont  to  do — nay.  he  even  toler- 


J96  THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

ated  it  as  a  co-operation  permissible  in  an  extraordinary 
strait,  and  excusable  by  the  license  due  to  a  stranger  like 
Grand'rnere,  and  by  the  presence  of  a  churchman  and  cleri- 
cal brother,  Mr.  Hoadley.  But  notwithstanding  this  con- 
cession, the  rector  feared  that  his  old  bugbear,  the  imprac- 
ticable methodistic  Whig,  Squire  Gage  of  the  Mall,  and 
Grand'rnere  Dupuy,  with  her  extravagant,  rebellious  bias 
as  a  Frenchwoman  and  a  Huguenot,  were  seducing  and  per- 
verting the  dabbling,  sentimental  lad  of  a  chaplain,  who  had 
gone  oft*  on  a  new  tack,  and  was  traveling  fifty  times  faster 
by  it  than  even  the  quondam  captain  of  a  slaver,  Newton 
of  Olney,  or  the  bred  grazier,  Scott  of  Weston,  thus  prepar- 
ing work  for  the  bishops  by  and  by. 

The  rector  could  not  go  in  with  their  doings,  though  he 
could  not  and  would  not,  in  the  present  crisis,  stop  them  by 
force.  He  had  his  own  views  of  faith  and  repentance,  and 
he  could  make  them  agree  with  Scripture  according  to  his 
logic.  He  would  pray  and  read  the  service  with  such  as 
would  accept  his  offices,  and  he  wras  far  from  refusing  grace 
to  any  man.  But  the  direct  addresses,  impassioned  repre- 
sentations, sublime  dogmas,  and  swift  changes  of  the  Meth- 
odists, with  their  agonies  and  their  transports,  were  not  in 
the  line  of  the  reserved,  orderly,  formal  rector,  any  more 
than  lay  preaching  and  the  public  ministration  of  women 
were.  He  had  no  disposition  to  cavil  at  the  doctrine  of 
original  and  abounding  sin  ;  but  that  application  of  it  which 
reduced  all  men  to  one  level,  and  placed  in  the  same  rank 
his  honest,  faithful,  gallant  hero,  laid  to  rest  where  his  colors 
had  been  planted,  on  the  plains  of  the  far  West,  with  the 
greatest  thief,  liar,  and  craven  vagabond  in  Sedge  Pond, 
was  all  but  hateful  to  Mr.  Philip  liolle.  Yet,  if  the  rector 
could  not  understand,  he  would  not  persecute — nay,  he 
rather  looked  on  with  thrills  of  sympathy  in  the  midst  of 
his  strong  objections,  and  granted  magnanimously  that  it 
were  no  wonder  thoughthc  whole  world  went  after  the  per- 
formance. 


THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY.  197 


CHAPTER  XVIII. 

MADAM     KOLLE'S     CALENDAR. 

Me.  Philip  Rolle's  summary  of  the  duty  of  women  was 
that  they  should  keep  house,  obey  their  hausbnds,  and  bring 
up  children.  His  aversion  to  engaging  in  any  public 
service  was  not  decreased  by  seeing  the  uncouth  wench, 
Deborah  Pott,  after  having  had  a  brush  with  the  enemy 
on  her  own  account,  creeping  out  of  the  Shottery  Cot- 
tage, hanging  on  the  skirts  of  Grand'mere  and  Yolande, 
and  beginning  to  give  very  awkward  assistance.  Deborah 
somehow  reminded  the  rector  of  Black  Jasper,  and  he 
could  not  help  feeling  that  if  these  new-fangled  liberties 
continued,  he  would  have  his  "fellow"  mounting  the  pulpit 
and  giving  out  the  psalm  at  least  once  a  day  over  his  mas- 
ter's head.  Mr.  Rolle  retired  to  his  rectory,  now  empty  of 
his  particular  womankind,  and  he  set  himself  to  bring  vivid- 
ly before  his  mind  a  sweeter,  more  womanly,  and  more  ex- 
cellent way. 

In  the  quiet  night,  when  all  the  rectory  servants  were 
asleep,  the  rector  sat  in  his  room.  He  could  not  rest,  so  he 
went  to  Madam's  little  Tunbridge  box  and  opened  it,  for  he 
had  the  key  of  it,  as  he  had  the  key  of  her  heart,  there  be- 
ing no  corner  in  all  her  domain,  or  in  all  her  thoughts,  which 
Madam  kept  close  from  the  rector.  There  was  something 
in  itself  suggestive  in  seeing  so  manly  a  man  tenderly  hand- 
ling and  turning  over  a  woman's  hoards  ;  and  yet  it  is  men 
like  the  rector,  autocratic,  imperious,  and  stoical,  who  prize 
above  all  things  the  softness,  even  the  helplessness,  of  wom- 
en, and  who,  in  their  relations  to  women,  have  an  inex- 
haustible well-spring  of  tenderness,  forming  a  striking  con- 
trast to  the  rock  from  which  it  issues.  "With  jealous  care 
and  delicate  reverence  Mr.  Rollc  disarranged  his  wife's 
treasures  in  order  to  find  what  he  sought.  Yet  they  were 
valueless  treasures  in  all  save  kindred  eyes,  and  he  knew 
them  all  well.  Chief  among  them  were  a  pair  of  worn 
fringed  gloves,  which  had  been  his  first  gift  when  he  had 


198  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

chosen  her  out  of  a  country-house  full  of  girls  for  his  part- 
ner, on  that  Twelfth  Night  long  past,  and  a  yellow  copy 
of  exceedingly  stilted  verses,  written  on  a  similar  occasion. 
He  pshawed  at  the  verses  as  his  own  boyish  rubbish,  but 
Madam  valued  them  as  highly  as  ever,  and  was  often  as 
near  angry  wTith  him  as  she  could  be  for  willfully  depreciat- 
ing what  she  kept  so  carefully  preserved  in  a  pouucet  box. 
There  were  two  or  three  letters  on  journeys  before  and 
immediately  after  their  marriage,  containing  elaborate  ad- 
vices for  the  improvement  of  her  mind,  and  even  of  her 
spelling,  with  dictatorial  directions  as  to  what  she  Avas  to 
read,  think,  and  believe;  and  these  struck  him  at  this  time 
of  day  as  strangely  pragmatical.  The  laboriously  prepared 
sermon  which  he  had  delivered  before  an  erudite  bishop, 
and  his  favorite  homily,  which  he  had  got  put  into  print 
with  some  small  detriment  to  his  purse,  he  found  carefully 
folded,  with  rose  leaves  laid  between  the  pages  to  scent 
them.  And  he  came  on  locks  of  hair  of  their  three  chil- 
dren. Two  of  them  were  Captain  Philip's ;  a  yellow  curl, 
the  companion  rings  of  which  had  met  no  rougher  touch 
than  the  pat  of  the  rector's  hand  and  the  kiss  of  Madam's 
lips;  and  a  dark  brown  lock,  the  fellows  of  which  Madam 
had  seen,  in  vision,  dank  with  death-sweat  and  glued  togeth- 
er with  life  blood.  There  were  also  two  cockades,  one 
which  Captain  Philip  had  worn  when  a  baby  to  distinguish 
him  as  the  rector's  boy,  for  Madam  had  "  been  so  mad" 
when  he  was  mistaken  for  a  girl ;  and  another  which  the 
young  officer  had  carried  through  fire  and  smoke,  as  a 
political  and  regimental  badge.  In  fellowship  with  these 
were  Captain  Philip's  letters  to  his  mother,  tattered  with 
much  reading,  most  of  them  ending  with  the  loving  assur- 
ance, "till  I  see  you  again." 

But  it  was  none  of  these  the  rector  was  in  search  of.  It 
was  something  of  a  slightly  different  character,  which  ho 
knew  was  among  the  papers.  It  was  a  sort  of  private  cal- 
endar which  Madam  had  made  of  the  Psalms  in  the  Prayer- 
book  that  she  had  used  since  she  was  a  girl.  Passages  had 
been  marked,  and  little  slips  of  paper  inserted,  of  different 
dates  and  different  stages  of  handwriting.  They  were  the 
shy,  simple,  devout  records  ol  a  modest,  purely  domestic 
life.  At  length  the  rector  found  it,  and  read  in  it  here  and 
there  what  touched  the  core  of  his  manly  heart: — 


TIIE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  199 

"Psalm  23d. — My  earliest  remembrance  is  being  kept 
out  of  bed  by  old  nurse  Simmons,  in  order  to  astonish  mother 
on  her  coming  back  from  evening  service,  by  my  childish 
proficiency  in  this  psalm.  As  it  was  my  earliest,  so  may  it 
be  my  latest  study." 

"  Psalm  119th. — In  my  youthful  years  I  was  so  given  up 
to  ambition  and  self-conceit  as  to  undertake  to  say  this 
whole  psalm  by  heart  to  Grandfather  Horner,  who  was  to 
give  me  a  silver  crown-piece  in  return.  I  need  not  say  that 
pride  got  a  fill  and  I  lost  my  crown-piece,  for  I  wearied  of 
my  task,  and  my  memory  broke  down  before  I  was  half 
done.  Mem. — To  ask  the  rector  whether  Grandfather  Hor- 
ner acted  judiciously  in  setting  me  such  a  hard  task,  thus 
stirring  up  my  spirit  of  emulation,  since  Sister  Betty  and 
Brother  Joe  tried  too.  For  long  it  was  only  by  a  mighty 
effort  that  I  got  over  a  dislike  to  that  jewel  of  the  experi- 
mental psalms ;  and  I  am  sorry  to  say  Brother  Joe  avers 
that  he  dislikes  it  to  this  day." 

"Psalm  1st. — In  preparing  for  my  confirmation,  my 
clergyman,  Mr.  Moultrie,  hath  hoped  that  I  shall  prove 
'  like  a  tree  planted  by  the  water-side.'  I  fear  me  'twill  be 
but  such  a  crooked  sapling  as  that  which  we  have1  all  laughed 
at  in  the  cherry  orchard.  Yet  may  not  God  be  tender  of 
what  men  laugh  at  ?" 

"Psalm  4th. — 'Thou  hast  put  gladness  in  my  heart  since 
the  time  that  the  corn  and  wine,  and  oil  increased.'  Word 
is  come  that  father  hath  lost  the  Hurstpierpoint  suit.  So 
that  though  he  is  still  a  gentleman  of  moderate  substance, 
me  and  my  sisters  have  no  longer  a  chance  of  being  heiresses. 
We  have  made  up  our  minds  to  our  loss  more  easily  than  we 
thought  to  do,  and  will  not  grudge  the  property  to  our 
cousins  Hep  worth.  We  made  quite  merry  last  night  on 
being  spinsters,  and  livingon  narrow  incomes  like  AuntPolly, 
who  mother  affirms  is  the  grig  of  her  family.  Father  hath 
not  been  so  little  humorsomc  for  a  long  time  as  during  this 
week,  because  he  says  he  can  endure  certainty,  like  a  man 
of  spirit  as  he  always  was;  and  indeed  his  temper  was  ruf- 
fled by  waiting,  and  by  what  he  called  lawyers"  quibbles. 
In  addition.  Brother  Joe  has  given  up  all  thought  of  going 
to  town  to  si  udy  in  the  Temple  and  learn  to  be  a  fine  gentle- 
man.  lie  tells  me  that  he  minds  not  the  deprivation,  for 
he  always  preferred  country  folk  and  the  green  fields,  which 


200  THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

will  make  home  so  much  less  lonesome  this  winter  than  if 
we  had  been  rich." 

"  Psalm  39th. — Our  Betty  hath  sunk  into  a  decline,  and 
passed  away  from  our  arms.  How  can  I  write  it  ?  The  last 
time  the  parson  was  with  her  he  read  this  psalm — 'twas 
the  last  one  Betty  heard,  when  her  beauty  was  consumed 
away,  '  like  as  it  were  a  moth  fretting  a  garment.'  Father 
said,  had  we  gotten  Hurstpierpoint,  the  removal  to  moister 
air  might  have  stayed  the  waste,  or  he  might  have  carried 
his  darling  to  the  court  physicians  ;  but  she  opened  not  her 
mouth  to  murmur  or  complain,  because  she  followed  One 
who  was  obedient  unto  death.  And  I,  too,  will  become 
dumb,  for  it  is  His  doing." 

"  Psalm  24th. — Mr.  Philip  Rolle,  who  is  a  distant  kins- 
man of  father's,  and  who  came  to  see  us  this  "Whitsuntide, 
did  say  that  the  verse,  '  The  earth  is  the  Lord's  and  all  that 
therein  is;  the  compass  of  the  world,  and  they  that  dwell 
therein,'  would  form  a  fine  inscription  for  trades  halls  and 
halls  of  commerce,  not  forgetting  the  Houses  of  Parliament, 
He  is  a  great  historian,  and  he  said  also,  of  the  48th  Psalm, 
that  the  verse, '  Thou  shalt  break  the  ships  of  the  sea  through 
the  east  wind,'  would  have  made  as  good  a  motto  as  that 
chosen  for  the  medal  our  Queen  Elizabeth  struck  to  com- 
memorate the  defeat  of  the  Armada.  Mr.  Philip  Rolle's 
opinion  must  be  worth  recording,  as  he  is  already  in  holy 
orders,  and  is  said  to  be  a  young  man  of  uncommon  parts 
and  promise,  for  so  fine  a  gentleman." 

"Psalm  0th. — 'My  beauty  is  gone  for  very  trouble,  and 
worn  away  because  of  all  mine  enemies.'  This  day  se'en- 
night  was  the  first  day  Dolly  and  me  and  Anne  Ventnor 
were  permitted  to  get  up  and  see  ourselves  after  the  modi- 
fied pox,  which  we  need  not  have  had  but  that  my  cousins 
Mapleton  would  not  keep  away  from  the  Hall  when  they 
had  a  case  of  the  natural  pox  at  the  Great  House.  At  last 
they  took  the  alarm,  and  then  they  insisted  on  mother  hav- 
ing all  of  us  inoculated  who  had  not  been  already  done.  I 
was  not  in  a  fit  state  for  it,  as  I  had  suffered  lately  from 
sick-headaches,  brought  on  by  cousins  Mapleton  making 
mischief  between  Brother  Joe  and  father,  and  leaving  us  to 
bear  the  brunt  of  it.  The  inoculation  has  gone  worst  with 
me,  so  that  I  have  almost  had  as  bad  a  bout  as  if  I  had  been 
afflicted  with  the  original  disease,  and  have  eome  out  as  thin 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  201 

as  a  whipping-post,  and  with  my  face  all  scarred  and  swol- 
len like  a  marred  turnip.  Somebody  will  not  know  me 
again  when  he  comes  back  to  the  neighborhood,  and  I 
don't  mean  to  help  his  memory.  The  worst  of  it  is  (and  it 
made  me  cry  like  a  baby  last  night),  that  cousins  take  the 
credit  to  themselves  for  getting  me  inoculated,  and  say  my 
sufferings  show  how  virulent  the  real  malady  would  have 
been  with  me,  had  I  ever  caught  it,  which  was  not  likely 
unless  busybodies  had  brought  it  to  me.  In  the  same  man- 
ner they  take  credit  for  getting  poor  Joe  in  grief,  professing 
that  it  will  l>e  a  lesson  to  him  not  to  take  his  game  off  his 
elders  and  betters  in  future.  Cousins  Mapleton  never  see 
that  they  do  any  thing  wrong.  I  have  not  forgotten  our 
Betty  and  how  lovely  and  pleasant  she  was,  and  how  very 
meek  under  God's  hand  ;  but  then  it  was  God's  hand, 
while  this  only  seems  the  hand  of  cousins  Mapleton." 

Below  this  entry  was  added,  in  the  comparatively  recent 
angular  hand  in  which  Madam  copied  out  her  recipes,  and 
occasionally,  with  a  touch  of  pride,  wrote  extracts  from  the 
Fathers  for  the  rector's  use:  "What  a  peevish,  vain  fool 
of  a  lass  I  must  have  been  to  make  so  solemn  an  application 
appropriate  to  such  a  trifle,  though  I  do  remember  it  seem- 
ed no  trifle  to  me  in  those  days.  I  wonder  why  Mr.  Ilolle 
had  aught  to  do  with  me,  as  if  he  would  have  demeaned 
himself  to  mind  a  painted  skin  (not  that  I  ever  touched  a 
paint  pot  in  ray  life — I'd  liefer  touch  pitch,  and  for  all  my 
outcry  I  was  as  plump  and  fair  as  ever  in  three  months 
time).  Cousins  Mapleton  were  perfectly  right;  as  I  have 
reason  to  be  thankful,  since  there  are  constantly  cases  of 
small-pox  occurring  in  Sedge  Pond.  I  have  brought  my- 
self to  take  the  same  precaution  with  the  completest  success 
in  the  case  of  my  lad  and  ray  little  lasses.  Even  about 
Brother  Joe  I  can  trace  his  becoming  solid,  putting  away 
childish  things,  and  showing  himself  mother's  besl  stay  and 
chief  support  in  her  widowhood,  to  his  being  forced  to  ap- 
pease father's  wrath  at  the  outrages  committed  on  my 
cousins  Maplcton's  credulity  and  nerves  by  new  alarms  of 
the  Scotch  rebels,  and  mock  thefts  of  jugged  hare  from  the 
larder." 

"Psalm  45th. — 'Hearken,  ()  daughter,  and  consider,  in- 
cline thine  ear;  forget  also  thine  own  people,  and  thy  la- 
ther's house.'     Philip  hath  not  chosen  that  verse,  or*  any 

12 


202  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

part  of  it,  for  my  posy  ring ;  not  that  he  reckons  it  would 
be  profaning  the  psalm,  which,  he  says,  was  an  epithalami- 
um  or  nuptial  song,  like  the  Song  of  Solomon  in  its  clay ; 
but  that  he  considers  it,  while  a  fit,  inspired  figure  for  a 
state  of  nature  which  ought  to  be  forsaken  for  a  state  of 
grace,  at  the  same  time  an  Eastern  sentiment,  and  not  to  be 
taken  too  literally.  He  is  not  afraid  of  any  rival  in  the 
oldest,  dearest  friend  I  have,  but  gives  me  leave  to  cherish 
them  to  the  utmost.  I  wot  he  has  no  cause  to  fear  any  of 
them." 

"Psalm  41st. — 'Blessed  is  he  that  considcreth  the  poor 
and  needy:  the  Lord  shall  deliver  him  in  the  time  of 
trouble.'  Mr.  Rolle  hath  very  discreetly  reproved  a  sinner 
of  high  rank  by  causing  to  be  laid  on  his  escritoire  a  copy 
of  this  verse,  though  the  upshot  is  that  the  sinner  (follow- 
ing my  husband's  good  example — I  shall  mention  no  names) 
hath  crushed  up  the  writing,  trampled  it  under  foot,  called 
the  writer  an  intolerable,  meddling  jackanapes,  and  ruined 
the  poor  man  without  delay.  But  my  husband  has  played 
his  part,  and  it  is  only  because  his  conscience  is  tender  that 
it  pricks  him,  and  tempts  him  to  declare  that  he  was  an  in- 
tolerable, meddling  jackanapes — leastways,  a  Avcak,  coward- 
ly fool,  to  hit  on  so  shallow  and  underhand  a  plan  ;  he  will 
never  do  so  again,  and  he  will  indemnify  the  poor  man  for 
the  injury  out  of  his  own  pocket;  which  is  like  my  good 
man,  both  the  taking  the  blame  upon  himself,  and  the  in- 
demnification." 

"  Psalm  13th. — '  Consider  and  hear  me,  O  Lord  my  God ; 
lighten  mine  eyes,  that  I  sleep  not  in  death.'  If  it  be  thy 
will,  good  Lord,  deal  mercifully  with  me,  and  spare  me  to 
the  best  and  noblest  of  husbands,  to  whom  I  think  I  am 
with  thy  consent  a  little  needful,  and  to  my  unborn  babe, 
when  my  pangs  come  upon  me." 

"  Psalm  lGth. — 'The  lot  is  fallen  to  me  in  a  fair  ground  : 
yea,  I  have  a  goodly  heritage.'  Make  me  thankful  and 
humble  of  heart,  my  Lord  and  Saviour,  in  that  I  have 
been  kept  to  see  this  day,  when  good  old  Mr.  Butler  hath 
made  a  Christian  of  my  boy,  giving  him  the  name  of  his 
worthy  father,  my  Lady  Rolle  and  Brother  Joe  standing 
for  sponsors." 

"  Psalm  56th. — 'They  daily  mistake  my  words:  all  that 
they  imagine  is  to  do  mo  evil.'     If  it  were  but  my  poor 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  203 

words,  I  should  not  mind  ;  but  the  rector's  own  wise  and 
righteous  words!  I  could  not  have  thought  it  of  Lucy 
Gage  ;  it  is  all  along  of  that  Whig  and  Methodist  squire  to 
say  that  Philip  Rolle's  sermons  narrow  and  shame  the 
grand  comprehensive  scheme  of  salvation !  Pray,  who 
should  know  how  to  deliver  doctrine,  give  his  testimony 
against  heresy,  and  hold  the  oracles  of  God  for  the  people, 
if  not  a  good  priest,  trained  for  and  faithful  to  his  work,  a 
gently-born,  just,  learned,  and  consecrated  man?  What 
insubordination  to  bring  into  the  parish  !  What  ingrati- 
tude for  all  the  rector  has  done  and  suffered  for  them! 
Well-a-day  !  the  world  is  a  wicked  and  weary  world,  not 
one  whit  better  than  in  the  days  of  King  David." 

"Psalm  104th. — 'Men's  flint  echo  of  the  song  of  the 
morning  stars,  and  the  shout  of  the  sons  of  God,  when  the 
great  Creator  made  this  ravishing  world.  Surely  it  will 
always  be  very  good,  in  spite  of  all  the  lying  lips  and  sharp 
tongues  speaking  vanity.'  MetTiinks  so  on  this  May  morn- 
ing, when  the  rector  has  stepped  out  from  his  study  win- 
dow on  to  the  lawn  and  paddock,  bareheaded,  and  called 
me  from  my  housewifery  to  look  at  the  promise  of  the 
apple-blossoms,  and  to  listen  to  the  thrush  in  the  lilac-bush  ; 
and  little  Philip  can  stretch  out  his  hands  ior  the  daisies. 
The  world  is  very  good  still.  It  is  men  who  are  bad  ;  but 
even  they  will  grow  good  at  last,  and  then  the  true  Golden 
Age  will  have  come,  the  rector  says." 

""Psalm  45th. — '  Gird  thee  with  thy  sword  upon  thy  thigh, 
O  thou  most  mighty,  according  to  thy  worship  and  renown.' 
My  soldier  hath  marked  this  verse  in  the  psalter  in  ac- 
knowledgment of  the  Captain  of  his  salvation.  May  he  be 
a  shield  "over  his  soldier's  head  in  the  day  of  battle,  and 
acknowledge  him  in  the  field  of  Armageddon." 

"Psalm  21st. — 'He  asked  life  of  thee,  and  thou  gavesj; 
him  a  long  life,  even  for  ever  and  ever.'  My  boy,  it  was 
not  the  life  for  ever  and  ever  that  I  asked  tor  you  then, 
nor  did  you  ask  it  for  yourself,  my  Phillip,  for  in  our  short 
sight  you  had  much  to  live  for.  You  were  much  wanted 
here,  my  son,  my  son.  But  the  crown  of  pure  gold  yonder 
will  make  up  for  all  the  crowns  of  brass  and  iron  here,  and 
the  felicity  which  is  everlasting  will  atom.1  a  thousandfold 
for  all  the  sweet  human  t i c-s  untimely  blighted  and  nipped 
in  the  bud.     The  joy  of  His  countenance,  which  maketh  you 


204  THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

glad,  my  dear,  dear  lad — what  sun  on  earth  could  shine  like 
that  smile  of  the  Master's  face?  What  king's,  or  conquer- 
or's, or  bridegroom's  bliss  could  approach  to  the  gladness 
of  the  royal,  loving  servant  raised  to  that  full  light  ?  Your 
mother  would  not  grudge  it  to  you,  but  that  she  is  at  once 
that  strongest  and  weakest  thing  on  earth — a  mother." 


CHAPTER  XIX. 

THE  last  kelic  of  the  galleys. 

The  epidemic  was  abating  at  Sedge  Pond,  and  Grand'- 
mere  had  consented  for  a  little  space  to  rest  and  be 
thankful.  She  had  sent  Yolande  abroad  one  evening  to 
gather  the  herbs  which  were  in  the  season  of  drying,  while 
she  herself  dozed  in  her  great  chair.  Suddenly  she  started 
up  and  rubbed  her  eyes.  'Her  expression  became  one  of 
mingled  endurance,  resolution,  and  triumphant  faith,  which 
made  her  features  look  young  again  with  their  air  of  early 
heroism. 

"  What  is  it,  Philippine  ?"  she  asked  quickly.  "  Have  I 
dreamed.  I  could  have  sworn  I  heard  the  shots  of  the  drag- 
onnades  once  more — saw  my  brother  Blaise  led  off  with  the 
rest  of  the  gang,  and  received  all  that  was  left  to  me  of 
the  father  of  Hubert  from  the  galleys." 

"  What  wonder,  Maruan  ?"  protested  Philippine.  "  I  am 
always  thinking  of  those  cruel  mockings  andscourgings,  and 
of  the  sainted  martyrs." 

"  But,  my  girl,  I  did  not  think  I  heard  and  saw  the 
things  with  which  I  was  familiar  before  you  were  born. 
What  can  it  mean,  my  friend  ?  Is  it  that  my  time  is  come, 
think  you?  Would  God  the  little  one  were  come  home, 
that  I  might  bless  her  with  my  last  breath,  if  it  be  His 
will." 

"  Xo,  no,  thou  wilt  not  leave  us,  memh'e"  besought  Phi- 
lippine; "thou  art  all  that  is  left  us  now  of  the  good  old 
times,  and  they  were  good  in  spite  of  their  woes — when  we 
were  a  spectacle  to  men  and  to  angels,  and  the  devil  could 
find  no  fault  in  us.  And  now  that  we  have  left  our  first 
love,  and  cast  in  our  lot  with  this  Sodom  of  an  England, 
thou  wilt  not  abandon  us   and    carry   away   all    that    we 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  205 

still  have  of  the  faithful  and  the  patrie  at  the  bottom  of  our 
groaning  hearts  ?" 

"  Ah !  I  have  it,"  cried  Grand'mere,  springing  up,  almost  as 
light  of  foot  as  a  maiden ;  "  console  yourself,  my  Philippine, 
I  may  live  to  grow  a  babe  again.  It  is  not  the  nearness  of 
death  which  is  unlocking  the  closed  chambers  of  memory ; 
it  is  the  face  of  my  dear  old  M.  Denis  Landre,  in  the  porch. 
Say  not  that  I  alone  am  left  you,  when,  if  he  will  deign  to 
turn  back  his  frills,  you  will  see  on  the  worn  bones  of  eighty 
what  ate  into  the  tender  flesh  of  sixteen.  He  is  the  last  Re- 
formed of  the  oars.  He  was  chained  to  the  benches  for  eight- 
een weary  years.  But  he  was  young,  kept  his  reason,  aud, 
escaping  at  last,  came  to  this  peaceful  court  of  England,  where 
he  hath  dwelt  and  labored  nearly  half  a  century.  He  is  on 
his  summer  round  to  watch  the  habits  of  God's  creatures, 
and  win  models  from  them  for  his  art,  and  if  you  ever  did 
honor  to  a  hero,  my  reverent  Philippine — if  you  would  en- 
tertain, not  the  three  Magi,  but  a  soul  come  out  of  great 
tribulation,  I  tell  you  this  will  be  the  day  for  it." 

By  the  time  Yolande  returned,  Monsieur  Landre  had  gone 
out  with  Monsieur  Dupuy  to  make  some  arrangements  for 
pursuing  his  studies  in  the  neighborhood  during  the  next 
week.  It  was  in  his  absence  that  the  girl  heard  the  great 
news  of  his  arrival.  Her  expectation  had  thus  an  interval 
in  which  to  rise  to  the  highest  pitch  before  he  re-appeared, 
and  she  should  be  presented  in  a  tumult  of  awe  and  de- 
light to  the  last  living  French  Huguenot  who,  for  con- 
science' sake,  had  undergone  the  burning,  fiery  furnace  of 
the  galleys,  and  had  come  out  without  a  hair  of  his  head  in- 
jured. 

To  Yolande's  intense  amazement,  and  all  but  utter  disap- 
pointment, Grand'more's  beau  ideal  was  a  little  grey  rabbit 
of  a  man,  dressed  punctiliously  in  a  blue  coat  and  laced  red 
vest  with  flapped  pockets,  the  latter  bulging  out  incongru- 
ously with  the  stones,  leaves,  twigs,  and  Bkewered  moths 
and  beetles  preserved  in  little  boxes,  for  which  he  had  a 
penchant.  He  pounced  upon  her  before  she  had  been  well 
named  to  him,  and  charged  her  a  little  austerely  with  blind 
blundering  in  bringing  a  wrong  herb  to  Grand'mere. 

"That,"  said  he,  "is  the  Lady-glove,  gant  <A.  I<i  dai  . 
mise,  and  a  campanule,  with  which  you  have  nothing  to 
do.     And  you  have  gone  and  mistaken  a  great  Marguerite 


206  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

for  a  souci.  Ouf!  where  are  your  eyes,  then  ?  Iu  your 
pocket,  or  at  the  back  of  your  hat,  he  P" 

Yolande,  on  her  part,  was  almost  disposed  to  ask  him — 
Did  the  three  Hebrew  children  not  differ  more  from  other 
Hebrews?  Did  they  so  outlive  their  supreme  test  and 
miraculous  deliverance  that  they  became  only  the  foremost 
husbandmen,  and  builders  of  houses,  and  planters  of  vine- 
yards, the  foremost  statesmen,  and  warriors,  and  bards  of 
all  the  tribes  throughout  the  strange  land  of  Babylon  ?  As 
for  Monsieur  Landre,  he  was  absolutely  silentf  when  Mad- 
ame Dupuy  met  him  with  a  sounding  apostrophe  tremulous 
in  its  sincerity. 

"  It  is  thou,  Monsieur,  who  hast  defied  the  tyrant,  whom 
the  pains  of  hell  could  not  turn  from  the  truth,  who  prefer- 
redst  the  taskmaster's  whip  and  the  fires  of  the  noonday 
sun  to  abjuring  the  Word.  What  are  we  that  thou  art 
come  under  this  poor  roof,  among  those  who  have  done 
nothing,  and  who  refuse  any  longer  to  believe  any  thing  ? 
What  can  I  do  to  make  you  more  welcome,  Monsieur  ? 
Permit  me  to  salute  the  hem  of  thy  redingote,  and  lay  the 
hairs  of  my  head  in  thy  path." 

He  remained  blank  to  all  direct  appeals  to  his  old  experi- 
ence, and  put  aside  every  bold  attempt  to  enlist  his  convinc- 
ing eloquence  as  the  last  survivor  and  eye-witness  of  the 
tortures  linked  with  the  dismal  tragedy  of  the  galleys,  for 
the  purpose  of  satisfying  the  craving  curiosity  and  breath- 
less interest  of  another  generation.  But  he  would  dis- 
course by  the  hour,  and  pour  out  hard  words  by  the  bushel, 
till  his  voice  grew  husky  with  the  burden,  on  the  most  min- 
ute specimen  of  wall-rue,  and  the  most  insignificant  fly 
curling  up  a  cylinder  for  itself  out  of  a  rose-leaf.  Or  he 
and  Grand'merc,  with  the  tears  in  their  eyes,  would  recall 
the  noble  old  French  Cathedrals,  from  which  their  faith  ex- 
cluded them,  though  their  fathers  had  built  them.  They 
would  speak,  till  the  listeners  grew  weary,  of  the  balconies 
with  screens  of  carved  leaves  and  flowers,  second  only  to 
nature's  festoons  and  garlands,  which  alternated  with  shields 
of  armorial  bearings  before  thehotels  of  the  nobility  in  the 
cities  and  provincial  towns. 

Monsieur  Landre  was  a  quaint  little  savant  and  artist,  lu- 
dicrously solemn  and  absorbed  in  his  studies,  without  any 
of  Monsieur's   blandness,  Madame's  passion,  Grand'mere's 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  207 

imagination  and  fine  sense,  or  Yolande's  enthusiasm.  A 
gruff,  abrupt  little  man,  with  an  exaggeration  of  self-respect 
and  stoicism  about  him ;  in  fact,  the  most  difficult  man  in 
the  world  to  conceive  chained  to  a  bench  and  stripped  to  the 
waist,  a  blackened  skeleton  among  rows  of  blackened  skele- 
tons, bending  mechanically  to  the  oar  in  a  sickening  drudg- 
ery of  degraded  toil,  varied  by  a  sharp  encounter  with  the 
English  frigates  when  the  galley-slave's  flesh  was  torn,  and 
the  lite  which  he  was  driven  to  hate  was  let  out  by  the  En- 
glish shot ;  or  if  he  escaped  this,  and  was  carried  to  the 
hospital  a  sorely-wounded  man,  he  was  still  fettered  to  the 
bed  on  which  he  lay,  because  his  stout  heart  could  not  be- 
lieve in  the  celebration  of  the  mass,  and  he  would  not  bow 
his  gaunt  head  at  the  elevation  of  the  host. 

When  Yolande,  after  the  two  had  retired  to  rest,  com- 
plained to  Grand'mere  of  the  anomaly  which  the  girl  found 
in  Monsieur  Landre,  Grand'mere  tried  to  bring  it  within 
her  comprehension. 

"  Denuis  Angre  Landre,"  she  explained,  "  was  never  a 
saver,  but  a  doer  ;  and  a  breach  as  wide  as  the  Red  Sea  lies 
between  the  two.  For  as  many  years  as  you  have  lived, 
my  child,  he  was  an  exile  in  the  foul  mouths  of  harbors,  and 
lying  out  on  the  same  everlasting  sea — birds  and  gross-eat- 
ing fish  soaring  and  swimming  around  him,  and  no  change 
meeting  him  from  day  to  day,  and  year  to  year,  but  the 
changing  of  the  clouds,  and  of  his  harsh  masters,  the  drop- 
ping off  of  his  comrades,  and  the  replacing  of  them  by  other 
worn  faces." 

"  Yes,  good  Grand'mere ;  but  should  such  suffering  not 
have  put  him  above  such  trifles?"  asked  Yolande. 

"  Ouais!  I  must  finish,  lie  makes  his  escape  at  last  by 
a  miracle  of  steadfastness  and  desperation,  and  hears  that 
he  has  long  been  left  an  orphan  without  near  kindred,  and 
has  lost  all  that  he  ever  possessed  of  worldly  goods.  There 
is  nothing  left  him  here  below  but  the  ereon  earth  of  God 
with  its  myriads  of  creatures,  and  the  power  of  copying 
them,  to  which  he  had  been  in  training  when  he  was  car- 
ried away.  And  Yolandctte  lilts  her  nose  and  wonders 
that  he  throws  himself  into  the  study  of  these  things,  and 
clings  to  them  with  the  devotion  of  a  lover  to  his  mistress  ! 
Denis  Landre  came  back  like  a  wild  Orson,  an  outlaw. 
There  were  others  who  came  back  wilder  still,  their  reason 


208  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMLY. 

lost,  memory  dead,  and  faith  only  feebly  flickering  and  feel- 
ing after  its  object,  until  it  should  be  changed  into  sight. 
Go!  You  are  a  pretty  girl  to  ask  why  such  a  one,  poor, 
and  true,  and  keenly  sensitive  to  all  the  defects  and  priva- 
tions of  these  endless  years,  should  desire  to  remedy  them 
— not  by  a  woman's  moans,  and  pets,  and  sour  grapes,  but 
by  seeking  anxiously  to  acquire  and  employ  the  habits  and 
practices  of  civilized  life,  even  to  the  wearing  of  a  perruque 
and  a  cane.  What  would  you  have  instead?  Do  men's 
tongues  wag  when  the  iron  has  entered  into  their  souls  ? 
Do  they  not  set  their  teeth,  and  are  they  not  dumb  for  the 
rest  of  their  days  ?  In  after  years  will  they  not  shudder 
still,  and  turn  their  backs  on  the  horrors  of  the  past,  as 
though  on  the  ghastly  croquemort  of  a  dream  ?  My  word  ! 
the  petite  has  gone  to  sleep  on  her  woman's  wit,  to  need 
such  explanations.  Why  should  she  give  herself  the  air 
of  a  sick  cat  because  a  great,  good  man — one  of  the  best, 
bravest,  and  most  modest  I  have  known — is  not  a  trumpet- 
er of  Gascony,  a  hero  of  the  spectacle  to  please  her  ?  She 
does  not  know  life,  the  sabotP 

"  Yes,  Grand'mere,  that  is  all  true.  I  was  a  spoiled  child, 
giving  myself  the  air  of  buying  sugar-plums  at  least.  But 
tell  me,  had  not  Monsieur  lloadley  right  on  his  side,  when 
he  said  there  was  nothing  worth  on  earth  but  the  saving  of 
souls  ?  These  poor  ones  in  the  village  here  do  but  recover 
their  stifled,  poisoned  breath,  and  turn  their  dim  distorted 
eyes  back  to  the  world,  when  behold  there  comes  a  man 
who  went  through  calamities  which  lasted  a  score  of  dreary 
years,  to  which  theirs  were  light  as  straws.  Do  you  tell 
me  he  survived  these,  and  succeeded  in  leaving  them  all  be- 
hind him,  in  order  to  give  himself  up  to  bagatelles  of  club- 
mosses  and  midges  ?" 

"  That  depends.  Is  nothing  in  the  universe  of  God 
worth  considering  save  men  and  their  souls  ?  But  agreed 
that  men  are  best  worth  men's  consideration  ;  is  there  only 
one  way  of  saving  souls  ?  Is  there  any  thing  common  or 
unclean  which  God  has  put  around  man  for  the  purpose  of 
instructing  him?  Common  or  unclean  !  when  every  sylla- 
ble on  every  page  of  God's  book  of  nature  reaches  upward 
to  a  marvel  of  rarity,  purity,  and  excellence?  For  what? 
The  satisfaction  of  its  Maker,  since  He  regards  all,  and 
counts  nothing  beneath  His  notice?     No  more  than  this? 


THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  209 

They  do  not  exist  that  He  may  he  known  in  His  works, 
that  they  may  bear  witness  of  Him,  and  that  His  saints 
maybe  perfected  through  them?  How  do  you  know  that 
the  growth  of  a  flower  or  the  life  of  the  tiniest  of  God's 
creatures  is  not  helpful  for  the  growth  of  souls  and  the 
life  of  their  life  ?" 

"  But  to  paint  them  upon  plates  and  jugs,  ma  mdre" 
argued  Yolande;  "to  design  little  groups  of  cows  drinking 
in  a  stream  or  lying  lazily  under  a  spreading  tree  for  but- 
ter-dishes, and  to  paint  shepherds  and  shepherdesses  on 
vases,  with  garlands  of  oak-leaves  studded  with  beetles  to 
encircle  them ;  to  bend  over  the  work,  busy  himself  with 
it,  and  dream  of  it  for  days  and  days  together — is  it  not  a 
kind  of  idolati'y,  as  Monsieur  Hoadley  says,  and  base  and 
unworthy  trifling  for  the  last  of  the  galley-slaves  to  demean 
himself  with  ?  Fiji  done  !  I  cry  with  vexation,  even  but 
to  think  of  it." 

"  Cry  for  yourself,  my  fine  girl,  a  thousand  times,"  pro- 
tested Grand'mere;  "as  for  Monsieur  my  young  pastor  ami 
you,  you  are  two  very  high  and  noble  personages  to  be  so 
far  above  the  plates  and  the  dishes !  One  of  you  has  not 
been  so  long  removed  from  the  bric-d-brac  ;  but  that  is  the 
way  of  the  brouille,  and  I  am  an  ungenerous  old  tttemontee 
to  speak  of  it.  For  me,  I  believe  that  the  doing  of  a  thing 
well  or  ill,  and  not  the  special  sanctity  of  the  deed,  is  the 
proof  of  the  hero,  the  saint,  and,  above  all,  the  Huguenot; 
and  that  the  question  is  not  so  much  whether  he  erects  a 
temple,  or  shapes  a  pair  of  pantaloons,  as  the  world  and 
the  Church  of  Rome  will  have  it.  Let  the  potter  turn  but 
one  cup  in  fair  proportion,  or  let  the  painter  re-produce  one 
true  image,  and  the  world  of  homely  men  and  women  is  so 
much  the  better  for  him.  And  what  is  a  stanch,  battered 
galley-slave,  that  he  should  despise  small  gains,  so  that  tinw- 
are honest  and  good,  and  won  by  the  best  exercise  of  his 
faculties?  Ma  mie,  if  you  will  see  the  day  of  great  dei  ds, 
you  must  not  despise  the  day  of  small  things,  whether  firsl 
or  last.  There  have  been  Avorse  things  than  galleys  ;  there 
have  been  scaffolds.  And  who  mounted  them  V  Preachers 
and  teachers  alone?  Not  at  all — workmen,  laborers,  men 
and  women,  skilled  like  Bezaleel  in  the  weaving  of  tapestry 
and  the  executing  of  jewelers'  work.  It  is  true  that  Palissj 
only  quitted  the  fountains  in  the  Italian's  garden  to  languish 


210  THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

in  the  Bastille,  but  Goujon  went  straight  from  the  torso  in 
his  atelier,  to  leave  his  own  headless  trunk  stretched  by  the 
block." 

"  Say,  then,  Grand'mere,  why  Monsieur  Hoadley,  who 
used  to  be  idle  and  vain  himself  among  the  goitilhommes, 
is  to-day  laborious  as  an  ox  and  sei-ious  as  the  moon?" 

"  Can  I  tell  you  why  Yolande  is  young  ?"  answered 
Grand'mere,  with  a  smile.  "  Monsieur  the  pastor  is  young 
also,  and  he  M-orks  in  the  dashing  spirit  of  re-action  and  re- 
formation. He  is  a  new  broom,  and  sweeps  clean  :  by  and  by 
he  will  be  older  and  smoother,  and  will  no  longer  tear  both 
himself  and  the  carpet.  He  will  then  give  every  one 
more  of  his  due,  be  more  tolerant,  more  charitable.  And 
what  then  ?  The  world  will  cry,  '  Voild  !  Monsieur  the 
pastor  has  grown  weary,  he  has  changed  his  mind  once 
more.'  Believe  it  not,  his  camarade.  He  was  sick  and 
sorry  with  all  his  heart,  and  he  took  an  oath,  from  which 
the  good  God  will  not  let  him  go  back.  He  will  be  a  man 
in  his  Christianity  yet — though  not  so  mellow  a  man  as 
Monsieur  Gage,  or  so  strong  a  man  as  Monsieur  Philip 
Itolle — but  a  man  in  his  own  fashion,"  Grand'mere  went  on, 
after  considering  within  herself,  "  a  little  with  tinged  sever- 
ity, perhaps  because  of  his  early  slackness  and  sin,  which 
found  him  out  always — not  a  dragon  as  now." 

"  And  I  also  am  a  dragon,  Grand'mere  ?"  demanded  Yo- 
lande, with  mock  courtesy  and  a  relieved  smile  ;  "I  humbly 
beg  pardon  of  Monsieur  Landre,  but  will  he  never  tell  us  what 
it  was  to  be  a  martyr,  and  what  the  galleys  were  like?  for 
otherwise  I  see  not  that  we  are  any  better  of  them." 

"  Have  patience,  my  daughter,"  cried  Grand'mere. 

Then  Yolande  had  patience,  and  consented  to  look  no 
longer  for  a  demi-crod  in  Monsieur  Landre,  but  rather  to  re- 
gnrd  him  as  a  poor,  tried  human  being,  who  had  suffered  the 
loss  of  all  things  here,  although  he  had  fought  the  good  fight 
and  kept  the  faith ;  and  who,  in  place  of  being  infinitely 
raised  above  men's  weaknesses,  was  full  of  the  eccentricities, 
oddities,  and  cross-grainedness  of  isolated  men.  Then  the 
girl  was  ready  to  admit  that  the  passion  of  the  old  galley- 
slave  for  nature  and  art  was  child-like,  self-forgetful,  and  not 
without  its  greatness.  She  saw  that  he  was  full  of  choice 
information  as  well  as  of  zealous  devotion  to  his  studies,  and 
that  what  he  could  impart  was  pleasant  information  to  re- 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  211 

ceive,  and  good  to  act  upon,  while  one  dwelt  in  this  creation 
of  the  Great  Worker,  who  sees  "  now  a  sparrow  fall  and 
now  a  world."  She  could  detect  that  the  reverent,  painstak- 
ing student  was  filled  with  interest  manifold  in  God's  broad 
Book,  therefore  he  never  tired  of  turning  over  the  leaves 
and  of  heartily  copying  in  his  materials  what  he  had  got  at 
first  hand. 

And  when  Monsieur  Landre  was  no  longer,  as  it  appeared 
to  him,  rudely  pressed  and  impertinently  assailed  on  his  in- 
human agonies  and  sorrows,  he  would  allude  to  them  briefly, 
but  naturally,  of  his  own  accord,  in  a  dreamy,  abstracted,  or 
a  solemn,  somewhat  weird  way,  which  made  the  slightest 
reference  more  impressive  than  the  amplest  details.  "  I  have 
a  stiffness  here,  Madame  Dupuy  mdre"  he  said,  touching 
his  throat ;  "  but  no,  I  was  not  born  with  a  crick  in  the 
neck.  We  were  neck-chained  once  in  the  hospital  at  Dun- 
kerque,  and  I  could  not  turn  my  head  for  a  month,  though 
there  was  a  pot  with  vanille  in  the  window  just  beyond  me. 
I  smelled  it,  and,  tvte-bleu!  how  I  wished  to  see  it,  and  the 
swallows  which  I  heard  in  the  eaves.  I  saw  them — never, 
psch  !  The  pot  was  knocked  down  and  broken,  and  the 
swallows  took  their  flight  to  Africa  the  day  before  we  were 
removed." 

"  Gangrene,  madame  ?"  he  exclaimed.  "  Oui-da,  we  had 
enough  of  the  gangrenes  when  the  argousins  would  only 
remove  the  chains  iVom  the  senseless  bodies  which  they  cast 
into  the  sea.  We  would  have  given — heaven  and  earth, 
I  was  going  to  say;  but  no,  not  heaven,  all  but  heaven, 
my  friends — to  have  been  senseless  for  one  day,  one  hour, 
when  we  carried  tons  weight  of  iron  on  bleeding,  fractured 
limbs." 

"  Little  dogs,  mU'e?  he  told  Yolande,  with  a  shade  of  dry 
humor,  "I  love  the  little  dogs.  I  am  very  happy  that  they 
were  well-treated  at  your  castle.  Their  name  was  once 
mine,  and  we  are  brothers,  the  little  dogs  and  me.  '  Dogs 
of  Huguenots,'  so  they  named  us  when  one  slave  or  another, 
educated  by  misery,  got  so  clever  under  his  education  that 
he  gave  the  slip  to  the  chain  and  the  bench,  or  when  he 
grew  mad  and  broke  all  his  bones  by  leaping  sheer  over 
the  bastion,  ami  all  the  fellow-slaves  on  the  benches  nearest 
him  were  bastinadoed  as  no  dog  would  have  been." 

"Oh!  how  cruel!"  said  Yolande,  thoughtfully. 


212  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

"  Bah !  rest  tranquil :  the  dogs  who  did  it  could  not  help 
themselves,  they  were  made  monsters  of  by  the  officers  in 
authority  over  them,  and  they  again  by  the  great  nobles  and. 
the  ministers  of  state ;  and  the  priests  told  them  all — and 
believed  it  themselves  for  the  most  part— that  they  were 
torturing  us  to  save  us,  or  at.  least  other  contumacious  fel- 
lows like  us,  from  perdition.  It  was  a  lie,  but  they  believed 
it,  and  what  would  you  have  ?  If  you  were  so  unhappy  as 
to  believe  that  bastinadoing  a  man  black  and  blue,  or  roast- 
ing him  to  a  cinder,  would  save  the  undying  soul  of  him  for 
ever  and  ever,  would  you  not  try  it?  Faith  of  Denis  Lan- 
dre!  I  believe  he  would  try  it  fast  enough.  Forgive?  I 
have  nothing  to  forgive.  Do  not  speak  of  that,  Madame ;  it 
was  all  a  horrible  mistake,  and  it  is  over — at  least  for  us  Hu- 
guenots. Often  the  guards  and  officers  were  sorry  for  us, 
and  helped  us  with  rags  and  water  and  wholesome  food,  as 
far  as  their  discipline  would  permit.  One  of  them,  a  Turk 
— positively  a  turbaned  Mahomedan— remembered  me, 
caught  a  rare  mirliflore  of  a  bird  for  me,  dried  and  stuffed  it 
of  himself,  and  after  keeping  it  for  quite  ten  months,  brought 
it  and  in  full  day  slipped  it  along  with  a  cluster  of  figs  into 
my  sleeve,  gravely  nodding  his  proud  head  and  long  beard 
as  he  did  so,  in  the  port  of  Marseilles." 

Doubtless  what  helped  Yolande  to  a  more  correct  estima- 
tion of  Monsieur  Landre,  was  the  circumstance  of  young 
Caleb  Gage's  coming  across  the  Frenchman  in  his  rambling 
exploration  of  the  country.  Though  Mr.  Hoadley  had  hasti- 
ly and  austerely  condemned  the  old  man,  judging  that  his 
mind  had  become  light  and  weak  at  the  very  least,  Caleb 
Gage,  on  the  contrary,  struck  up  a  friendship  with  him, 
Frenchman  though  he  was ;  and  conceiving  an  immense  re- 
spect and  admiration  for  the  man  of  science,  the  skilled 
modeler  and  mechanician,  waxed  loud  in  his  praise.  And 
young  Caleb  had  another,  and  for  the  moment  a  bigger, 
blacker  crow  to  pluck  with  Grand'mere  for  excluding  him 
from  the  Shottery  Cottage,  by  her  foolish  Frenchwoman's 
schemes,  when  a  man  was  there  who  could  have  taught  him 
so  much,  and  from  whom  he  would  have  been  delighted  to 
learn.  Whether  the  world  would  ever  honor  Monsieur 
Landre  as  he  deserved  to  be  honored,  or  not,  he  had  not 
only  maintained  his  views  of  the  right  through  worse  than 
death,  but  Caleb  felt  the  Frenchman  would  leave  Ins  mark 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  213 

in  another  form  on  the  world's  treasures,  and  contribute 
another  lesson  to  its  store-house  of  testimonies. 

Yolande,  with  her  subtle  instincts,  apprehended  Caleb 
Gage's  appreciation  oi  Monsieur  Landre,  and  his  inclination 
toward  the  savant ;  and  it  not  only  caused  the  girl,  who 
secretly  admired  and  reverenced  the  young  squire,  to  be- 
come a  docile,  intelligent,  eager  disciple  of  the  naturalist, 
who,  like  all  right  noble  teachers,  valued  a  docile,  intelligent 
disciple,  and  exerted  himself  to  meet  her  wants  and  pour 
into  her  thirsting  mind  rivulets  from  his  own  stream  of 
knowledge  ;  but  it  caused  her  to  take  a  simple,  pure,  wom- 
anly pride  in  her  association  with  Monsieur  Landre,  and 
in  his  friendship  for  her,  the  true  child  of  Grand'mere. 
And  Caleb  Gage  would  have  given  his  riding-whip  and  his 
hunting-boots,  his  fowling-piece  and  his  fishing-rod,  to  have 
been  the  privileged  partaker  of  the  trouble  Monsieur  took 
with  her,  and  of  the  acquisitions  she  was  making  in  the 
branches  of  knowledge.  Monsieur  Landre,  who  was  mas- 
ter in  so  much  which  the  young  squire  prized,  did  not  scorn 
the  head  and  the  heart  which  the  tyro  had  rejected. 
Whether  the  day  should  ever  come  that  Yolande  would 
meet  Caleb  Gage  on  his  own  and  Monsieur  Landre's  ground 
as  an  equal  and  more,  was  very  doubtful ;  but  come  or  come 
not,  Grand'mere,  Monsieur  Landre,  France,  and  womanhood 
should  have  no  reason  to  blush  for  their  child. 


CHAPTER   XX. 

FADING. 

"  And  now  all  the  people  love  Grand'mere."  So  Yolande 
ended  an  enthusiatic  account  of  the  doings  of  Grand'mere  in 
a  conversation  which  she  had  with  Monsieur  Landre,  close 
upon  their  parting. 

"  Not  oil  the  people,  my  mademoiselle." 

"  Yes,  yes,  Monsieur,  all ;  for  Grand'mere  served  all,"  re- 
peated Yolande  proudly. 

"  The  very  worst  motive  for  fickle  people  to  act  upon," 
muttered  Monsieur  Landre.  "Had  it  been  because  the 
people  served  Madame  the  Grand'mere,  I  should  have  bad 
less  fear." 


214  THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

"  Fear,  Monsieur !"  exclaimed  Yolande  making  large  eyes. 
"How  fear?" 

"I  can  not  tell,  but  I  love  not  popular  emeutes  either  of 
wrath  or  gratitude.  I  mean  that  I  trust  them  not.  Grati-' 
tude — yes,  that  is  a  quality  honorable  and  lovely — in  a 
heart  which  knows  its  why  and  wherefore,  wholesome  as 
bread  ;  but  it  is  apt  to  be  a  simple  Jureur,  like  heady  wine, 
given  to  ferment,  in  the  unthinking  and  unstable  heart  of  a 
crowd.  It  is  in  the  tail  of  the  mob  which  shouts  '  hosanna' 
that  the  venom  lies  perdu.  But  I  have  done  wrong  to 
speak  of  such  things  when  they  can  not  be  prevented.  Be- 
hold, enough  of  them.  Let  us  wait  upon  Providence,  and 
the  fortunes  of  France  may  come  in.     Who  knows  ?" 

Yolande  was  not  satisfied,  but  felt  uneasy.  Monsieur 
Land  re  had  set  her  thinking,  and  had  shaken  her  faith  in 
the  regard  felt  by  the  villagers  of  Sedge  Pond,  which  had 
been  born  and  bred  of  favors'  all  on  one  side.  She  knew 
that  some  of  them  had  been  brutal  in  their  former  lives,  and 
she  saw  not  a  few  of  them  returning,  almost  before  the 
plague  had  flown,  to  their  old  evil  habits.  They  wTere 
growing  shy,  too,  of  Grand'mere,  and  sulky,  even  to  bear- 
ing a  grudge  against  her  who  was  a  silent  reproach  to  them, 
while  she  hardly  ever  spoke  to  find  fault  with  any  of  those 
whom  she  had  succored.  She  trusted,  hoped,  and  waited 
for  the  fruit  which  might  hang  white  and  heavy,  in  place 
of  the  mildewed,  poverty-stricken  seed  of  her  experience, 
when  the  place  which  knew  her  should  know  her  no  more. 
"  If  we  but  take  a  few  hostages  we  have  done  well,"  cried 
the  high-hearted  old  woman,  cheerily,  as  she  looked  at  the 
uncouth  Deborah  Pott  and  a  few  others.  But  the  young 
woman  was  cruelly  disappointed  at  the  revival  of  the  irrev- 
erent wakes,  the  bloody  fights,  the  hard-drinking  bouts, 
and  also  at  the  coolness  and  hostile  feeling  between  the 
Shottery  Cottage  and  its  neighbors,  now  embittered  by  the 
blinding  shadow  of  a  wrong. 

This  disappointment  to  a  nature  like  Yolande's,  at  once 
impulsive  and  introverted,  the  warning  of  Monsieur  Landre, 
and  the  cessation  of  the  pleasant  and  healthful  lessons  which 
she  had  got  from  him,  either  preyed  on  her  health,  or  else  a 
sudden  failure  of  strength  developed  all  the  fear,  distrust 
ami  dismay  which  were  at  the  root  of  the  girl's  heart.  This 
was  the  last  linu-erincr  case  of  the  illness  bred  of  the  sum- 


THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  215 

mer's  heat.  It  came  on  after  the  briony  berries  were  hang- 
ing ripe  in  the  hedges,  and  the  leaves  were  crimson,  orange, 
and  grey  by  the  wayside.  Taking  the  individual  forms  of 
nervous  prostration,  wasting  feverish  fits,  and  aguish  chills, 
Yolande's  sickness  was  of  a  dangerous  kind. 

At  its  commencement,  Yolande,  who  as  yet  had  known 
nothing  of  disease,  whose  pure,  pale  cheek  had  been  until 
now  as  perfectly  healthful  as  the  buxom  red-rose  faces  of 
Milly  and  Dolly  Rolle,  was  keenly  alive  to  every  sinking 
power  and  strange  new  pang ;  and  while  she  showed  a 
woman's  endurance  and  meekness,  she  yet,  with  the  swift- 
ness of  her  age,  sex,  and  simplicity,  made  up  her  mind  that 
she  should  die. 

It  was  hard  to  go  away  even  to  the  good  God  and  Father 
— to  the  blessed  Saviour  and  Elder  Brother,  even  though 
her  childhood  and  youth  had  been  passed  in  the  shade  of 
exile,  among  fugitives  in  a  foreign  country.  Notwithstand- 
ing that  her  opening  womanhood  had  received  a  blow  which 
still  thrilled  it  with  a  sense  of  tribulation,  vague  pain,  and 
inextinguishable  yearning,  and  though  every  other  pulse  of 
being  was  beating  low,  yet  life  was  very  sweet  to  her,  as 
to  other  young  creatures.  It  was  hard  to  quit  the  fields 
she  knew  and  the  living  things  that  dwelt  in  them  just 
when  she  was  learning  every  day  to  understand  and  prize 
them  more  and  more;  hard  even  to  leave  the  villagers  who 
would  not  abandon  their  shocking,  shameful  sins,  although 
they  had  been  saved  by  a  great  deliverance. 

She  felt  it  hard  to  part  even  from  Deb,  whose  elaborate 
ministrations  and  their  collapses  made  her  still  laugh  weak- 
ly ;  and  from  Prie,  whose  softened  harshness  now  made  her 
cry.  She  thought  with  pensive  tenderness  of  Monsieur, 
who  would  not  miss  her  greatly,  so  long  as  he  had  the  dear 
old  mother,  but  who  looked  astonished  and  somewhat 
troubled  at  her  coming  before  him  in  this  matter  of  pre- 
maturely fading  away.  As  for  Madame,  it  grieved  her  to 
see  her  child ;  the  mother's  set  face  said  little  and  much  ; 
her  strung  faculties  seemed  to  need  neither  rest  nor  refresh- 
ment, and  she  scouted  at  sleep  and  food  for  herself,  remain- 
ing a  grim  watcher  and  dumb  suppliant  against  Death, 
who  approached  with  the  crashing  step  of  a  conqueror  over 
what  was  mortal,  though  Christ  had  died,  yea,  was  risen 
again. 


216  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Ah !  and  the  tears  rose  to  Yolande's  eyes  as  she  looked 
on  Grand'mere,  tender  and  true,  bright  with  a  tremulous 
brightness.  For  why  should  Grand'mere  give  way  ?  Who 
should  sustain  the  drooping  spirit  of  her  darling,  if  not  she  ?' 
"Who  should  uphold,  fan,  and  cherish  the  nickering  name 
of  life  till  it  revived,  if  not  she  ?  And  should  she  be  doom- 
ed to  mourn  for  a  short  but  awfully  sharp  separation,  the 
time  for  mourning  would  come  all  too  soon.  But  now,  she 
would  not  sin  against  the  long-suffering  delicacy  and  mod- 
esty of  true  womanhood  by  untamed  bursts  of  passion  and 
the  abandonment  of  anguish  ;  she  would  not  thus  cloud  the 
close  of  the  young  days,  which  might  be  running  out  faster 
than  the  river  to  the  sea,  nor  rudely  shake  the  golden  sands 
of  life  by  her  sorrowing. 

At  first  Yolancle  was  full  of  pathetic  care  and  longing 
sorrow  for  Grand'mere's  chastened  grief.  "  What  will 
you  do,  Grand'mere? — what  will  you  do?"  was  the  con- 
stant cry,  varied  by  fond,  anxious  plans  of  how  Prie  was 
to  water  the  jardotidre,  and  Deb  to  sleep  on  the  mattress 
on  the  floor.  Membre  was  to  read  other  books  than 
the  Huguenot  mem-oirs ;  Monsieur  was  to  go  no  more 
journeys  to  London  and  Norwich ;  and  Yolaude  would 
be  almost  satisfied  if  there  could  only  be  found  an  or- 
phan child  of  the  emu/res  of  Spitalfields  or  Canterbury  for 
Grand'mere  to  call  '  Yolandette,'  to  lead  by  the  hand,  ca- 
ress, and  bless.  Then  she  would  utter  waking,  startling 
cries : 

"Oh,  heavens!  she  is  standing  there  still — is  it  not  so? 
Why  does  no  one  bring  the  fav&euU?  Sit  down,  dear 
Grand'mere;  lay  your  cheek  on  the  cushion,  Id,  Id;  she 
has  had  no  gofiter.  Why  does  no  one  mix  the  salad  and 
pour  out  the  almond  milk  ?  Eat  and  drink,  Grand'mere;  go 
into  the  garden,  my  heart,  and  see  if  the  jasmine-tree  is  still 
powdered  like  a  marquis,  and  if  the  walnuts  are  as  big  as 
beans,  and  if  the  Reiue  Claudes  are  blushing,  as  they  used 
to  do  in  France." 

So  long  as  the  excitement  lasted,  no  fervent,  steady,  assur- 
ance of  Grand'mere's  could  quiet  the  disorder  of  the  earnest 
alfections.  She  would  say,  "I  shall  do  well,  little  one.  I 
lean  on  t\\c  fauteuil  \  I  eat  and  I  drink.  Shall  I  bring  you 
a  sprig  of  the  jasmine,  and  lay  it  on  your  pillow  ?  Fie !  let 
not  your  cheeks  shame  it ;  let  them  grow  less  white,  let 


TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  217 

them  grow  round  as  a  periwinkle,  and  pink  as  a  Daphne, 
ray  girl." 

But  Yolande  of  herself  soon  drifted  gradually  into  that 
second  stage  of  illness  when  God's  finger-touch  calms  the 
ruffled  feelings,  quiets  the  loving  cares,  and  replaces  them 
by  passive  submission  so  perfect  that  it  might  be  taken  for 
apathy,  but  for  the  conscious,  deliberate  surrender  of  re- 
sponsibility, the  transfer  of  trust  to  another,  and  the  rever- 
ent appeal  to  God  for  all,  save  the  bodily  ailment — a  sub- 
mission which  lifts  the  sufferer  above  the  world. 

And  thus  Yolande  lay,  removed  from  her  friends,  as  all  in 
sore  sickness  are,  except  from  those  who  hover  and  cling 
round  them,  in  the  altogether  unnatural  and  exceptional  life 
of  the  sick-room,  Avhere  prevails  permanent  twilight — some- 
thing between  the  last  sunset  and  the  new  day.  All  sounds 
are  muffled  and  dull  there,  and  all  interests  are  concentra- 
ted in  the  spring  which  issues  from  one  personality — a  per- 
sonality to  all  appearance  fast  ebbing  and  receding  from 
the  grasp  of  kindred  personalities,  like  the  last  wave  of  a 
low  sea  in  spring  tide.  Yolande  lay  thus,  waiting  till  the 
question  of  life  or  death,  which  she  had  already  answered 
for  herself,  should  be  decided  by  another  tribunal  where  she 
had  no  voice. 

The  world  without  heard  and  apprehended  that  the 
young  Frenchwoman  of  the  Shottery  Cottage  lay  a-dying. 
Regret  was  no  doubt  felt  by  some  that  they  might  never 
more  see  her  forming  a  figure  in  the  Watteau  groups  in 
the  garden-bower,  in  the  cottage-porch,  or  in  the  dark  par- 
lor, at  which  they  had  so  often  pointed  clumsy  fingers  and 
scurrilously  jeered.  Some  remorse  would  seize  them  as 
they  thought  of  her  relation  to  the  past ;  for  had  not  Yo- 
lande gone  in  and  out  among  the  people,  and  had  she  not 
caught  the  malady  while  minding  their  sick — though  folk 
did  say  it  had  taken  rather  a  queer  turn  in  the  foreigner, 
and  was  neither  the  falling  sickness  nor  the  putrid  fever. 
Well-a-day,  they  were  sorry  for  Mademzelle,  that  were  they  ; 
she  was  so  young  to  be  taken,  though  she  was  most  likely 
a  Jesuit  or  a  spy,  at  any  price.  Yes,  Yolande  had  her 
mourners  among  the  rough  villagers;  and  as  there  is  noth- 
ing like  death  for  condoning  offenses,  magnifying  merits, 
and  crowning  the  wearer  with  a  very  nimbus  of  glory,  it  is 
more  than  probable  that  had  Yolande  died  now  she  would 

K 


218  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

have  escaped  the  tumult  of  sudden  love  subsiding  and  re- 
bounding as  suddenly  into  old  deep-rooted  aversion  and  dis- 
gust, and  would  have  lived  in  the  popular  memory  spirit- 
ualized as  rude  minds  might  have  spiritualized  her  into  the 
pale  pitiful  ghost  of  a  young  dead  girl  who  had  made  up  for 
being  French  by  passing  betimes  to  the  great  congress  of 
nations,  where  there  is  neither  Jew  nor  Gentile,  Greek  nor 
Scythian.  Nay,  her  very  memory  might  have  been  a  medi- 
um for  reconciling  the  enmity  which  had  existed  between  her 
people  and  the  people  of  Sedge  Pond,  having  gone,  with  the 
good  deeds  towai^d  her  neighbors  in  her  hand,  straight  to 
Him  of  whom  the  parson  preached  that  his  command  ever 
was,  "  Love  your  enemies." 

The  sister  of  the  brazen  woman  whose  child  Yolande  had 
taken  into  her  pure  arms  one  day  sauntered  up  to  the  Shot- 
tery  Cottage  gate,  and  defied  the  virtuous  indignation  of 
Priscille  by  persevering  in  her  question  as  to  how  the 
young  Madame  was — a  faint  blush  on  her  bold  brow  the 
while.  The  fellow  of  the  bad  man  whose  curses  Grand'- 
mere  had  not  feared,  and  who  cursed  no  more,  but  contin- 
ued to  cry  mightily  for  a  blessing  upon  her,  so  completely 
forgot  himself  and  his  horror  of  everlasting  woe,  that  he 
went  into  the  autumn  fields  to  gather  poppy-seeds  and  hop- 
berries  to  form  a  pillow,  in  order  to  procure  an  hour's  sleep 
for  the  sick  girl's  restless  head.  Even  at  the  ale-house, 
where  the  greatest  jealousy  existed  against  the  frog-eating, 
grimacing  foreigner,  who,  instead  of  contributing  to  the 
custom  of  the  place,  rather  damaged  it,  fierce  accusations 
and  foul  jests  were  for  the  time  silenced.  Indeed,  the  uni- 
versal sentiment  was — "  Sin'  the  lass  lies  a-dying,  we'll  say 
nought  again'  them  for  the  present.  Let  'em  a-be  ;  we  say, 
let  'em  a-be;  happen  it  may  be  our  own  turn  next.  We 
raun  be  decent,  lads  and  lasses,  in  our  nagging.  Death  wipes 
out  the  heaviest  score." 

Madame  at  the  rectory,  leaving  her  cherished  solitude, 
came  home  from  her  sea-side  refuge,  and  would  have  watch- 
ed like  a  mother  over  Yolande  for  the  sake  of  the  old  wom- 
an who  had  wept  over  Madam's  Philip  in  his  prime.  She 
was  scared,  however,  by  the  grim  mother  of  Yolande,  who 
would  suffer  no  interloper  by  the  bed  where  she  stood 
sentry. 

Milly  and  Dolly,  those  arrant  cowards,  not  without  an 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  .  219 

overpowering  horror  of  Yolande's  ghost  haunting  them  if 
they  failed  in  their  attention,  ventured  near  the  cottage 
armed  with  fever  water,  civets'  tails,  and  camphor  bags ; 
but  once  on  the  spot  they  threw  away  the  civets'  tails  and 
the  camphor  bags,  and,  seated  on  the  outer  stair,  looked  up 
at  the  darkened  window  and  bemoaned  Yolande  like  the 
companions  of  Jephtha's  daughter.  Notwithstanding  this, 
however,  Milly  and  Dolly  kept  Black  Jasper  riding  to  and 
fro  between  the  rectory  and  Reedham,  and  Madame  was 
at  her  wit's  end  with  false  alarms  about  attacks  of  the  epidem- 
ic shown  in  tangible  and  bewildering  symptoms  for  days 
and  days  together. 

Mr.  Lushiugton,  with  his  cauliflower  wig  and  noble  calves, 
his  person  drooping  and  slouching  in  its  gorgeous  peach 
and  scarlet,  appeared  at  the  Shottery  Cottage,  no  longer 
with  gifts  of  pigs'  puddings  and  crab-apples,  but  shaking  his 
powdered  head  ruefully,  and  holding  his  empty  hands  behind 
his  back,  saying  huskily,  "Who'd  e'er  have  thought  it? 
God  have  mercy  on  her!  She's  beyond  we  at  this  date, I 
take  it." 

But  Yolande  was  not  beyond  the  recognition  of  his  voice, 
sonorous  in  its  whisper  ;  and  she  sent  him  a  very  girlish 
message,  the  glitter  of  her  eye  on  fire,  as  she  spoke,  with  the 
inward-burning  fever. 

Old  Caleb  Gage  bent  over  Grand'mere's  hand  with  the 
strangest  and  most  wistful  half-apology,  not  merely  for  him- 
self, but  for  his  God.  "  I  am  but  a  man,  my  dear  old  Mad- 
ame. I  can  not  tell  a  mother's  heart,  but  my  Lucy  used  to 
remind  me  that  He  whom  we  ignorantly  worship  is  the 
great  Father.  In  the  name  of  the  poorest  and  worst  fa- 
ther here,  I  bid  you  remember  that  I  love  my  boy  not  less, 
but  more,  when  I  elect  him  to  a  post  of  difficulty  and  danger, 
and  bid  him  keep  it,  and  suffer  great  things  at  it  in  his  Fa- 
ther's name,  and  for  his  brethren's  sake.  And  were  God  to 
bid  him  come  up  at  once  to  his  own  mother,  because  there 
were  far  greater  things  for  him  to  do  with  her  yonder  than 
any  poor  failures  which  he  could  make  with  me  here,  I  w  ould 
pray  that,  though  I  should  die,  I  might  not  deny  the  right 
of  Caleb's  God  and  its  wisdom  and  justice." 

Grand'mere  did  not  lose  her  meekness  and  faith  then, 
although  she  shook  and  tottered  on  the  brink  of  the  grave 
herself.     "Go,  my  Mend, and  pray  that  my  faith  fail  not 


220  THE    IIUGUENOT   FA1IILY. 

also,"  she  urged  ;  and,  like  Joseph  among  his  brethren,  con- 
tained herself  till  all  should  be  over. 

But  there  was  a  change  upon  her  when  Mr.  Hoadley, 
with  a  faint  tap  at  the  door  in  the  dead  of  night,  came  to 
her  Avith  the  appearance  of  having  been  torn  by  wild  horses 
or  by  seven  devils.  He  described  himself  as  having  been 
engaged  in  fighting  the  "  old  man  within  him,"  and  he  had 
gone  without  either  food  or  sleep  as  long  as  Madame  had 
done ;  but  what  a  weak  woman  can  do  with  comparative 
impunity  drives  many  a  strong  man  beside  himself.  Mr. 
Hoadley,  by  no  means  a  strong  man,  had  become  possessed 
by  an  idea,  grand  enough  in  itself,  for  it  Avas  unearthly  and 
devoted  ;  but  he  Avas  the  more  tempted  on  that  account  to 
make  a  horrible  Moloch  of  it,  and,  in  grim  and  ghastly 
offering,  to  slay  before  it  all  his  natural  affections.  Pie  had 
been  sleeping,  so  far  as  he  had  slept,  and  Avaking,  in  his  par- 
son's clothes  during  the  crisis  of  Yolande's  illness  ;  he  had 
wrestled  in  prayer  and  paced  over  miles  of  road,  trying 
desperately  to  Avalk  doAvn  his  doubts.  But  he  received  no 
comfort,  because  the  honest  love  Avhich  had  led  him  back 
to  duty  and  to  God  he  miscalled  idolatrous  and  unregener- 
ate.  Thus  slandering  and  stamping  upon  it,  he  was  scorched 
to  the  bone  with  its  struggling  flames,  and  besprinkled  with 
the  ashes  of  its  humiliation.  No  Avonder,  then,  that  he 
looked  like  a  crazy  creature  Avhen  he  found  his  Avay  to  Grand'- 
mere,  and  addressed  her  with  an  unstiflcd  groan. 

"  Woe  to  us,  Madame,"  he  began,  "  for  avc  have  made  for 
ourselves  an  idol,  and  it  shall  be  broken.  I  call  upon  you  to 
repent,  as  I  seek  to  repent,  in  the  depths  of  my  misery.  I 
call  upon  you,  her  Graud'mere,  to  join  with  me  in  giving  her 
up  lest  she  should  be  spared  to  arise  and  Avork  her  oavu  and 
our  destruction,  and  to  cover  us  with  the  degradation  and 
shame  of  our  idolatry.  Behold  the  Bridegroom  cometh  ! 
let  us  go  out  with  our  virgin  to  meet  Him." 

Graud'mere  stood  up  before  Mr.  Hoadley,  and  for  almost 
the  first  time  in  her  life  forgot  the  mortal  agony  of  another 
in  her  own  sufferings.  She  denied  the  charge,  and  declared 
it  was  he  Avho  dishonored  his  God,  and  not  she  or  her  child. 

"  She  Avas  my  child,  and  not  my  idol,  man.  God  Avho  has 
a  father's  heart,  gave  her  to  me,  and  Ave  together  returned 
our  thanks  to  Him.  He  bade  me  love  and  not  hate  her. 
He  even  deigned  to  compare  his  love  to  mine.     If  you  tell 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  221 

me  that  I  have  not  loved  her  sufficiently,  I  will  believe  you. 
If  you  say  her  God  and  Saviour  want  their  little  one,  then 
I  answer  that  I  understand  that,  for  I  want  her  also ;  but  it 
is  right  and  necessary  that  my  want  should  yield  to  theirs, 
though  I  should  be  bereft  indeed.  I  see  the  necessity,  and 
I  will  still  cleave  to  the  Giver  and  Taker,  because  in  a  very 
little  time  He  will  give  back  to  an  old  woman  the  gift  which 
was  his  originally,  and  which  He  counted  so  precious.  But 
if  you  tell  me  she  is  an  idol,  and  not  an  angel,  and  that  she 
is  smitten  in  order  that  I  may  be  smitten,  that  I  may  be 
better  by  being  mutilated,  then  I  tell  you,  man,  you  speak 
the  devil's  lie,  and  not  God's  truth  ;  you  bear  false  witness 
against  your  God." 

So  with  her  feeble  hands  the  old  woman  put  the  young 
man,  the  most  confounded  of  the  two,  out  of  her  presence 
and  away  from  the  sacred  precincts  of  the  sick-house. 

Young  Caleb  Gage  came  not  all  through  Yolande's  griev- 
ous illness ;  and  while  she  had  little  or  no  sense  of  the  tor- 
ture which  would  neither  let  Mr.  Hoadley  go  nor  stay,  she 
had  an  abiding  sense  of  Caleb  Gage's  absence.  She  was 
not,  however,  heavily  offended,  Grand'merc  having  long  ago 
plucked  the  cankering  sting  of  shame  out  of  the  girl's  heart. 
Caleb  had  not  met  her  friends'  choice  with  his  choice,  and  it 
was  inevitable  that  he  should  stay  away ;  only  his  staying 
away  made  death,  as  it  had  made  life,  all  the  wearier  and 
drearier  for  the  obligation.  He  went  about  his  ordinary 
occupations  and  amusements.  He  was  still  his  father's 
right-hand  man,  and  superintended  the  draining  and  trench- 
ing at  the  Mall  which  had  been  recently  begun  ;  and  he 
rode  to  market,  and  hunted  and  fished  and  shot  as  usual. 
But  sometimes,  on  these  days  of  brooding  stillness,  he  would 
lie  for  hours  and  hours  among  the  ling  on  the  Waaste  in  the 
silence  and  solitude,  or  take  shelter  there  amid  the  storms 
which  in  the  woods  herald  the  fall  of  the  leaf.  There  was 
nothing  to  break  in  upon  his  engrossed  senses  save  the 
drone  of  the  bee  ;  the  crack  and  whirr  of  the  grasshoppers 
among  the  bristling  wild  grass,  the  furze,  and  rag-wort;  or 
the  wail  of  the  plover  in  the  grey  distance.  There  was  no 
sight  to  force  itself  on  his  abstracted  c\  e  >a\  e  lonely  savage 
nature  which  had  not  yet  acknowledged  man  for  its  master. 

It  was  not  because  the  young  squire  was  an  intense  lov- 
er and  student  of  Nature  that  he  withdrew  at  this  time  into 


222  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

her  retreats.  He  did  not  much  care  whether  he  meditated 
in  a  well-beloved  resort  like  the  Sedge  Pond  Waiiste,  or 
within  barren  stone  walls.  It  was  more  endurable  for  him 
at  intervals  to  go  aside  and  confront  the  spectre  which 
haunted  him,  saying  plainly,  "  Here  I  am,  do  your  worst ;  I 
shall  stand  it  and  seek  no  reprieve."  What  harm  had  he 
done,  then?  He  had  been  led  a  dogged  dance  of  sulky 
protest  by  a  superannuated,  fantastic  old  Frenchwoman, 
and  that  was  all.  Nay,  he  could  abuse  and  make  light  of 
Grand'mere  no  longer,  not  even  in  the  safe  secrecy  of  his 
own  thoughts,  when  he  knew  that  the  poor  old  soul  was 
hanging  over  the  death-bed  of  her  darling. 

As  for  that  figure  which  rose  up  before  him  in  the  most 
unlikely  places,  haunting  and  harassing  him  in  the  half  for- 
eign elegance  and  daintiness  of  the  sober  brocade,  in  the 
stately  sweep  of  the  train  which  never  encumbered  the  youth- 
ful trip  of  the  feet,  and  the  dark  hair  and  eyes,  the  pearly 
cheek,  and  the  meditative  mouth,  Caleb  Gage  could  make 
nothing  of  it.  Only  this  he  knew,  he  could  not  go  on  bearing 
malice  against  such  unmistakable  gifts  and  graces,  because  of 
a  bad  and  impertinent  French  precedent.  lie  had  insisted 
upon  resolutely  turning  his  back  upon  beauty  of  person  and 
character,  while  now  it  seemed  these  were  doomed  to  shrivel 
up  and  wither  in  their  bud  more  speedily  than  even  the 
grass  of  the  field.  How  could  he  help  asking  himself,  like 
the  rest  of  the  besotted  world  of  Sedge  Pond,  Why  had  it 
come  to  this?  Was  there  no  help  for  it?  How  would  it 
have  been  if  the  event  had  been  different  ?  Had  his  young 
wife  or  his  plighted  bride  been  wasting  and  waning  like  this 
harvest  moon,  how  would  it  have  affected  him  ?  And  this 
Eolande  had  never  seen  her  full  lustre,  but  was  dying  out  in 
her  first  quarter.  He  wished  now  that  he  had  not  been  so 
hasty  and  ungenerous — that  he  had  been  wise  enough  not  to 
have  taken  the  overture  at  the  first  word,  overwhelming  the 
friendly  contracting  parties  with  confusion  and  consterna- 
tion. Of  course  he  was  not  called  upon  to  marry  when  and 
whom  his  father — good  and  reasonable  though  he  was — and 
the  old  Madame,  who  had  pitifully  burned  her  fingers,  thought 
fit ;  but  then  he  might  have  gone  more  graciously  about  his 
objections.  What  did  Yolande  think  of  his  contumely? 
Had  it  hurt  her  in  her  sweetness;  for  they  said,  and  he  be- 
lieved, that  she  was  sweet  ?    Had  she  in  her  superiority  cared 


THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  223 

for  him  the  least,  been  inclined  to  stoop  to  such  a  snarling 
lout  as  he,  who  could  not  be  so  magnanimous  as  to  make  al- 
lowances for  foreign  ways  and  manners,  but  must  needs  ap- 
pear to  impugn  the  perfect  modesty  and  delicacy  which  the 
greatest  boor  she  had  tended  at  Sedge  Pond  would  have 
guarded  as  he  would  a  lily  in  its  sheath  ?  Indeed  he  would 
far  liefer  have  been  the  veriest  boor  of  them  all,  than  have 
so  wronged  any  woman.  And  now  had  the  very  flower  of 
womankind  regarded  him,  not  as  a  matter  of  expediency,  but 
softly  and  kindly  in  her  coyness,  her  French  maidenliness, 
and  been  so  rewarded  ?  Where  was  the  use  of  his  asking  ? 
He  should  never  know  what  had  been  worth  the  world  to 
know,  if  he  had  not  been  ill-conditioned,  and  other  people, 
the  best  of  them,  had  not  bungled  and  blundered.  Where 
was  the  use  of  his  contrition?  She  would  never  know ;  she 
was  dying  in  her  chamber  in  the  Shottery  Cottage,  minister- 
ed to  by  Parson  Hoadley,  who  had  valued  her;  and  the 
death  of  the  noblest,  sweetest  woman  in  the  world  would 
lie  at  his  door,  even  though  he  would  willingly  have  died  to 
save  her. 

So  the  days  went  on,  till  the  day  of  thanksgiving  and  re- 
joicing, when  in  the  little  world  of  Sedge  Pond  it  seemed  as 
if  the  sun  all  at  once  broke  through  a  dense  dark  mist,  dis- 
pelling the  doleful  shadows.  More  than  one  man  and  wom- 
an woke  up  as  from  a  bad  dream.  They  went  out  and  shook 
themselves  like  Samson,  not  thinking  that  the  Spirit  of  the 
Lord  might  have  departed  from  them,  but  rather  wondering 
and  smiling  at  their  melancholy  and  their  folly,  returning 
with  a  will  to  former  lines  of  conduct.  Yolande,  too,  raised 
herself,  very  weak  and  faint,  a  very  atom  of  a  girl ;  but  with 
all  the  difference  between  death  and  life  in  her  looks  and 
speech,  and  with  earthly  hope  re-kindled  in  her  languid  eye. 

"But  I  do  think  I  am  better,  Grand'mere,"  whispered  the 
girl.  "  I  shall  walk  abroad  with  you  again,  after  all  ;  I  who 
thought  never  to  do  it  more.  Petite  mere,  I  am  glad,  and 
you  also,  all  of  you  are  glad.  And  you,  who  are  not  only 
wiser  and  purer,  but  stronger  than  I,  do  you  render  thanks 
to  God  for  me  to-day,  and  we  shall  pay  our  vows  together 
when  my  sicknesses  and  infirmities  are  all  -one." 

Grand'mere,  in  her  own  mode,  rendered  thanks  in  her  inner- 
most chamber.  She  broke  down  utterly,  and  beat  upon  her 
breast  at  last,  with  a  passionate  protest  : 


224  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

"  What  am  I,  unworthy  wretch,  to  receive  so  many  great 
mercies,  when  others  cry  in  vain,  and  stretch  out  their  hands 
all  day  long,  and  still  death  breaks  down  their  barrier  and 
bears  away  the  heart  of  their  hearts  to  the  dark  grave  and  the 
unseen  spirit  world  ?  Lord,  Thy  presence-chamber  is  yonder, 
but  Thy  creatures  are  here,  and  they  love  their  fellow-crea- 
tures whom  Thou  hast  given  them  ;  and  when  Thou  takest 
them  away  without  ruth  or  stay,  poor  human  hearts  would  die 
within  them  were  it  not  that  there  is  One  who  Avas  lost  and 
is  found  again.  And  He  was  no  prodigal  son,  but  the  true 
bien-aime  of  the  Father.  So  they  will  go  to  their  lost,  and  find 
them  in  the  end,  though  their  lost  will  not  come  back  to 
them.  My  God,  did  the  widow  of  Sarepta  stand  silent  be- 
fore the  other  widows  whose  sons  and  daughters  came  no 
more  into  their  bosoms,  abase  herself  because  of  them,  and 
weep  sore  for  them  ?  Lord,  if  I  ever  forget  that  those  whom 
Thou  hast  smitten  are  among  the  apples  of  Thine  eye,  be- 
cause even  the  sinful  human  mother's  heart  yearns  most 
over  her  suffering  child — then,  Lord,  forget  me  in  my  need. 
When  we  wish  to  hang  our  dogs  we  say  they  are  mad ;  and 
when  we  wish  to  justify  Thy  mysterious  ways  to  men,  and 
to  trade  upon  them  for  our  own  base  profit,  we  slander  Thy 
afflicted,  and  try  to  get  our  own  of  retaliation  and  revenge 
out  of  them.  But  thou  dost  not  want  our  villainous  justify- 
ing, and  Thou  hatest  our  cruel  kindness.  Lord,  if  I  am  ever 
spiteful,  malicious,  and  harsh  toward  Thy  wounded  ones — if 
I  presume  to  treat  with  a  high  hand  their  groaning  impa- 
tience, their  sick  waywardness,  their  sore  desperation  as  the 
false  friends  of  Job  dealt  with  the  woes  of  Thy  servant  of 
old — if  I  count  up  their  offenses  and  think  to  visit  them  on 
the  offenders,  and  cause  them  to  pay  double  for  their  sins  in 
the  day  of  their  trouble,  because  their  God  is  stripping  and 
making  them  poor,  that  He  may  make  them  and  many  more 
rich  —  if  I  dare  to  sit  in  judgment  on  Thy  miserables  — 
then  Lord,  smite  me  and  strip  me,  before  I  lose  altogether 
the  image  of  my  Maker,  and  go  into  a  place  of  sterner  pun- 
ishment." 


TIIE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  225 


CHAPTER  XXL 

THE    HONORABLE   GEORGE'S   TRAVELING   CHARIOT. 

The  dusky  green  of  July  and  August  had  waxed  and 
waned  into  the  ruddy  brown  of  October.  The  leaf-fingers 
of  the  chestnut,  like  the  fists  of  a  miser,  were  yellowing  and 
shriveling  round  the  rich  mahogany-tinted  nuts  ;  the  beech- 
trees  were  masses  of  crimson  and  scarlet  in  the  low  slanting 
sunbeams ;  while  the  few  corn-fields  among  the  pasture- 
lands,  now  reduced  to  stubble,  were  crackling  under  the  feet 
of  sportsmen.  These  effects  of  color  were  dazzling  and  gar- 
ish to  Grand'mere,  whose  eyes  had  been  early  trained  to  the 
cool  darkness  of  the  pine  and  the  dim  blueness  of  the  olive; 
but  Yolande,  with  the  affluence  and  elasticity  of  young  life, 
was  able  to  go  abroad  again,  and  even  to  face  the  slight 
sting  of  frost  which  made  healthful  the  mellow  air. 

There  was  little  inward  change  iu  the  girl,  save  that  with 
the  enthusiasm  of  a  prisoner  or  an  invalid  on  his  return  to 
the  free  open  world,  she  had  a  double  relish  for  hardy  out- 
door life  and  simple  country  pursuits.  There  was  greater 
outward  change.  The  blood,  beginning  to  course  afresh  in 
the  thin  white  cheeks,  flushed  them  with  a  quickness  and  ar- 
dor, and  tinged  them  with  a  brilliance  which  had  not  before 
lit  up  the  subdued  tone  of  her  complexion.  The  formal  roll 
of  hair,  in  the  fashion  of  Grand'mere's  silver  roll,  had  given 
place  to  the  short,  dark  clusters  which  were  all  the  fever 
had  left  on  the  shapely  head.  No  round-eared  cap  with 
dominant,  imposing  ribbon  bow  (though  Yolande  had  added 
to  this  portion  of  her  dress  a  starched  ruff  and  tucker)  could 
accord  to  these  clusters  the  old,  becoming  air  of  sober  wisdom 
and  dignity.  And  what,  indeed,  if  Yolande,  grave  and  shy 
as  she  used  to  be,  Avas  a  little  thoughtless  in  the  intoxication 
of  her  release  from  heavy  discipline,  and  the  thankfulness  and 
cheerfulness  of  her  convalescence  !  She  was  pretty  sure  to 
come  to  her  senses  speedily,  and  to  go  on  more  sedately 
than  ever,  with  only  a  little  more  humility  and  a  little  more 
forbearance  for  others — a  brighter  checker  in  her  humor  for 
all  time  to  come,  because  of  this  short  season  of  mirth  of 

K2 


226  THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

spirit  which  was  like  to  verge  on  giddiness.  Neither  Grand'- 
mere,  nor  even  Madame  herself,  could  find  it  in  her  heart  to 
check  Yolaude  sharply,  and  to  put  a  stop  to  what  was  ben- 
eficial for  the  confirmation  of  her  health  before  the  severe 
gloomy  English  winter  set  in.  Indeed,  the  older  women  at 
the  Shottery  Cottage  were  shaken  out  of  their  bland  and 
austere  rigidity  by  the  dispensation  of  sickness.  They 
would  let  the  younger  woman  run  oif  out  of  their  sight  on 
long  walks  and  varied  excursions,  into  the  lanes  for  black- 
berries, among  the  hazels  for  filberts,  and  along  sandy  tracts 
of  the  Waaste  for  wild  liquorice-roots,  in  no  better  company 
and  with  no  greater  protection  than  that  of  Milly  Rolle, 
who  had  struck  up  a  devoted  friendship  for  Mademoiselle 
on  her  restoration  to  Sedge  Pond  society.  Not  even  the 
return  and  brief  sojourn  of  the  family  at  the  castle  could 
shake  Milly's  sudden  passion  for  a  bosom  friend,  by  recall- 
ing her  to  her  sworn  allegiance  to  my  lady.  So  Dolly,  with 
the  occasional  assistance  of  Madam  at  the  rectory,  was 
left  alone  to  serve  Lady  Rolle,  who  never  looked  near  the 
Shottery  Cottage,  conducting  herself  as  if  her  tenants  there 
had  been  entirely  brushed  from  her  mind.  "  And  a  mighty 
good  thing  they  were  so,  and  not  turned  out  of  the  cottage 
at  twelve  o'clock  some  stormy  night,  right  into  the  sloppy 
village  street,"  his  honor,  Mr.  Lushington,  was  heard  to 
cogitate. 

Grand'mere  was  touched  by  the  late-come  fancy  of  one  of 
the  rectory  girls  for  a  Dup'uy. 

"  The  poor  red  and  white  thing,"  she  would  soliloquize, 
"  she  grows  up  tender  as  that  dear  duck  of  a  girl  Deb,  and 
that  kind  black  dog  Jasper.  I  love  them  all ;  and  my 
Yolande  loves,  and  is  loved  by  them  also,  and  becomes  so 
much  more  human  and  sweet,  so  much  less  of  a  reserved, 
ascetic  Protestant  nun.  For  me,  I  like  good  ordinary 
girls,  unassuming  and  unconscious,  even  with  the  faults 
of  girls,  like  primroses  and  daisies  with  earth-stains  upon 
them,  and  not  spoiled  nuns,  with  pinched  poverty  of  na- 
ture here,  and  rank  passions  there,  like  the  twisted  mon- 
strous cacti  of  Mexico.  As  all  the  waters  run  together,  and 
meet  in  the  river,  so  girls  ought  to  run  together,  and  meet 
in  the  humanity  which  grows  and  grows  till  its  top  reach 
the  skies.  There  will  be  no  confusion  of  tongues  to  break 
in  upon  and  scatter  it  again,  because  of  one  tongue  which 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  227 

spake  as  never  man  spake,  and  speaking  once,  speaks  forever. 
Neither  will  it  be  a  perfect  humanity  of  atoms  and  entities, 
but  of  all  the  families  of  the  earth,  where  the  girls  will  be 
girls,  and  the  old  women  old  women.  I  believe  it,  I  hope 
it.  It  is  not  the  usage  of  France,  but  for  me  I  have  not 
much  more  fear  of  the  promenades  of  the  fillettes  than  of  the 
horse-gallop  of  the  gargon.  I  ought  to  have  less  when  the 
last  is  often  a  grand  gallop  to  the  hospital.  The  girls  will 
card  and  color  each  other  as  the  French  calico  weavers  on 
the  Thames  and  at  Bromley  Hall  bend  their  threads  of  flax,  to 
form  one  fair  pattern.  Go !  beat  the  parquet  with  the  truth, 
unless  it  is  reflected  in  the  mirror  of  a  fellow-face.  The 
red  and  white  Milly  is  more  interesting,  and  yet  more  dis- 
trait, than  she  used  to  be — she  is  not  such  a  mere  spoiled 
child.  The  petite,  again,  is  more  of  a  child  growing  down- 
ward or  backward,  instead  of  upward.  But  truly  she  can 
afford  that,  the  wise  child,  and  the  price  pays  the  piper. 
Better  to  spread  out  bushy  and  strong  than  to  spring  up 
into  a  maypole.  Ld,  Id,  old  Genevieve,  thou  kuowest  it 
well.  Chase  away  nature  tripping  on  two  feet,  and  behold 
she  will  come  back  racing  on  four." 

But  Grand'mere  was  more  than  dissatisfied,  she  was  dis- 
pleased and  apprehensive,  when  she  learned  from  Yolande, 
who  was  discomfited  and  troubled  in  her  turn,  that  when  the 
two  younger  women  were  out  in  their  mantles  and  capu- 
chins, their  little  baskets  over  their  gloved  arms,  they  were 
apt  to  meet  Mr.  George,  from  the  castle,  in  the  most  unex- 
pected ways,  and  in  the  most  opposite,  unlikely  directions. 
At  least  they  were  unlikely  directions  for  a  gentleman  who, 
when  at  the  castle  on  former  occasions,  had  been  wont  only 
to  stroll  in  sleepy  elegance  toward  the  bridge  about  sunset, 
for  the  laudable  purpose  of  affording  the  modicum  of  exer- 
cise necessary  to  his  small  friend  and  dog,  or  to  saunter 
down,  earlier  in  the  day,  to  make  the  frequenters  of  the  ale- 
house proud  by  looking  on,  and  laying  a  bet  on  bowls  and 
balls,  to  keep  up  his  skill. 

"You  make  no  more  promenades,  whatever  English 
modes  may  be,"  cried  Grand'mere,  decisively,  and  some- 
what tartly  for  her. 

"But  he  is  at  present  quite  respectful  and  gentle,  Grand'- 
mere," protested  Yolande,  puzzled  and  almosl  affronted. 
"  Monsieur  from  the  castle  says  no  longer  '  little  Dupuy,' 


228  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

but  '  my  very  good  mademoiselle.'  He  no  longer  picks  up 
the  trains — he  carries  only  the  baskets ;  though,  do  you 
know,"  she  went  on,  whispering  mysteriously,  and  with 
bashful  importance,  "  he  is  the  friend  of  Milly,  as  I  think." 

"  A  friend  in  truth  !  exclaimed  Grand'mere  in  increased 
indignation,  under  which  she  veiled  her  alarm.  "  I  tell  you 
that  you  make  no  more  promenades,  and  I  go  to  speak  to 
the  rector  about  the  friend  of  his  daughter." 

"  Oh,  what  have  I  done  ?"  urged  Yolaude  in  lively  dis- 
tress. "  Milly  will  be  in  anguish,  and  so  will  I,  because  I 
shall  have  told  tales  on  her,  who  has  begun  to  have  so 
much  kindness  toward  me.  They  are  tales,  if  not  fancies, 
for  she  denies  that  she  has  any  thing  to  do  with  milord,  and 
she  promises,  if  I  am  afraid,  that  she  will  never  speak  to  him, 
nor  let  him  come  near  us  again,  till  he  ask  the  permission 
of  Monsieur  the  rector.  Do  you  understand,  my  good 
Grand'mere?  It  will  be  an  afternoon  of  misfortune  if  you 
do  not,  and  go  and  make  your  naughty  child  a  pie  of  a  tell- 
tale and  slanderer  of  her  friend.  Trust  to  Milly,  Grand'mere 
— you  who  are  so  full  of  trust  and  generosity.  You  have 
suffered  me  to  go  about  the  village  with  that  Monsieur 
Richard — that  young  pastor,"  she  added,  with  a  little  sar- 
castic emphasis ;  "  where,  then,  is  the  diiference,  when  Milly 
has  been  brought  up  with  Mr.  George,  as  one  may  say,  and 
when  my  lady  his  mother  is  her  patroness  and  kinswoman  ? 
She  is  the  next  person  who  will  be  offended.  Misericorde! 
I  shall  speak  to  Milly  myself,  if  you  wish  it ;  I  shall  not 
cross  the  threshold  of  the  cottage,  but  shall  watch  my  poor 
friend  from  the  window  of  the  garret,  if  that  will  do  any 
good,  and  if  you  will  not  inform  Monsieur,  the  Spartan  fa- 
ther, Avhom  Milly  fears  so  terribly,  though  she  loves  him 
dearly." 

Grand'mere  saw  that  there  was  some  reason  in  Yolande's 
remonstrance,  and  at  the  same  time  the  old  Frenchwoman 
had  a  modest  sense  that  she  could  not  be  a  perfect  judge  of 
manners  in  England.  She  let  her  better  wit  sleep,  and  re- 
frained from  farther  interference  in  the  matter,  except  what 
had  to  do  with  keeping  her  own  child  at  home  till  the 
great  Rolles  should  be  off  the  tapis. 

Grand'mere  was  confirmed  in  her  forbearance  by  knowing 
that  Milly  ltolle  was  either  prudently  confining  herself 
within  the  bounds  of  the  rectory,  or  was  content  to  dawdle 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  229 

away  her  time  and  hang  disconsolately  with  Yolande  over 
their  samplers  in  the  porch  of  the  Shottery  Cottage.  When 
they  were  not  thus  engaged  they  paced  with  arms  inter- 
twined, round  and  round  the  narrow  walk  by  the  fish-pond. 
Grand'mere  songht  rather  to  warn  the  girls  indirectly, 
while  she  amused  them  by  queer  proverbs,  and  by  the  in- 
variable French  legend  of  a  wandering,  impossibly  beauti- 
ful, and  benevolent  princess,  beset  for  the  nonce  by  troops 
of  wolves,  each  wolf  taking  the  form  of  a  light-headed,  re- 
gardless fine  gentleman. 

Notwithstanding  this,  Grand'mere  in  her  own  person  had 
something  of  the  fool  of  quality,  and  was  easily  persuaded 
to  discredit  the  existence  of  evil  unless  there  was  proof 
positive  of  the  grievous  fact.  When  Mr.  George  wound  up 
his  supposed  meditation  of  mischief  by  paying  unexpected- 
ly a  ceremonious  visit  to  Grand'mere,  the  infatuated  Hugue- 
not bourgeois  and  Christian  gentlewoman  could  not  yet  re- 
gard it  as  a  piece  of  effrontery  and  an  undue  liberty,  but 
took  it  for  what  he  did  not  even  pretend  it  to  be — an 
atoning  duty  to  wipe  out  his  mother's  desertion  and  condem- 
nation. It  would  not  have  signified  much  what  face 
Grand'mere  had  put  on  Mr.  George's  attention,  unless  her 
obstinate  single-heartedness  could  have  worked  a  miracle 
in  piercing  the  thick  skin  of  overweening  vanity  in  the  man. 
In  defense  of  Grand'mere's  security,  it  may  be  said  that  so 
far  as  Mr.  George's  doportment  and  conversation  during  his 
visit  went,  he  might  have  hoodwinked  Solomon  himself, 
from  the  perfect  inoffensiveness  of  his  bearing  and  his  top- 
ics, though  they  did  not  range  so  far  as  from  sleave-silk  to 
predestinations,  but  merely  from  chip  hats  to  tambour  nee- 
dles. 

Grand'mere  looking  at  and  listening  to  the  easy  good- 
breeding  of  the  slim,  polished  speaker,  was  inspired  with 
the  ambition  of  showing  herself  a  genuine  lady  of  the 
essence  of  Huguenotism  and  Christianity,  since  she  repre- 
sented the  Household,  Monsieur  being  shut  up  in  his  cabi- 
net, Yolande  sent  out  of  sight,  and  Madame's  hostility  hav- 
ing become  more  and  more  of  a  mania.  She  could  not 
think  that  there  could  be  much  in  the  dibonnaire  compan- 
ionship any  more  than  that  force  dwelt  in  the  delicate 
hands  with  the  five-pound  rutlles  fluttering  over  the  knuck- 
les.    As  the  hands  tapped  the  jeweled  snulf-box,  its  very 


230  TI1E    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

lid  conveyed  a  prettily-concocted  pinch  of  flattery,  for  it 
bore  the  choice  miniature  in  enamel  of  the  Duchess  de 
Longueville,  Grand'mere's  loveliest  countrywoman,  who 
became  a  Jansenist,  if  not  a  Huguenot.  Grand'mere  could 
have  descanted  by  the  hour  on  the  poor  storm-torn  rose  of 
the  Fronde  wars;  and  when  the  enthusiastic  old  woman 
found  that  Mr.  George  was  making  a  rare  collection  of 
such  miniatures  to  hand  him  down  to  future  generations  as 
an  exquisite  virtuoso,  she  readily  undertook  to  procure  him 
a  priceless  likeness  of  a  Magdalene  in  a  king's  court,  in 
Louise  la  Valliere.  George  Rolle  would  take  "  the  goose," 
with  Grand'mere's  own  ewe  lamb  to  the  bargain,  if  with 
all  his  idle  prowling  he  could  beguile  to  destruction  a  silly 
little  animal.  And  Grand'mere  was  assailed  on  her  weak 
side,  and  all  her  suspicions  were  lulled  to  sleep.  As  the 
best  of  us  are  apt  to  do  in  similar  cases,  she  forgot  that 
there  was  evidence — awful  overwhelming  evidence — that 
these  fine  hands  would  grip  like  claws,  for  the  individ- 
ual, and  for  the  order,  insolently  and  relentlessly,  without 
stint  or  measure.  These  were  the  hands  of  languid,  fantas- 
tic, corrupt  giants,  not  of  puny  dwarfs,  as  some  have  im- 
agined. 

At  length  the  happy  day  arrived  when  the  Holies  took 
their  departure  from  the  great  arrogant  white  blot  of  a  cas- 
tle till  the  next  election.  My  lady,  the  ruling  passion 
strong  in  her  leave-taking,  chose  to  turn  over  her  coaches 
to  her  sons  for  the  present  journey,  and  to  make  the  jour- 
ney herself  by  slow  stages  in  her  chair;  for  to  be  borne  all 
the  way  to  town,  not  by  horses,  but  by  men,  was  something 
novel,  and  fell  in  with  her  ladyship's  mood. 

Grand'mere  had  certainly  a  lucid  interval  in  the  delusion 
which  was  on  the  eve  of  receiving  its  death-blow ;  she 
breathed  more  freely  "when  she  heard  that  the  progress  of 
the  quality  was  past  and  gone ;  she  hummed  "  Marlbrook" 
in  her  shaking  voice,  and  granted  Yolande  carte  blanche  to 
run  out  with  Milly  Hollo  beyond  the  Shottery  Cottage 
garden-gate  and  the  Sedge  Pond  village  street. 

That  evening  she  went  herself  to  call  the  children  to  sup- 
per, and  walked  as  far  as  the  garden-gate,  to  which  old 
Squire  Gage  had  come  reading,  as  ho  rode,  escorted  by  his 
goodly  son,  a  summer  agone.  The  scene  recalled  to  Grand'- 
mere's mind,  as  freely  as  yesterday,  the  group  which  had  at 


THE    UUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  231 

first  taken  her  fancy,  and,  as  she  paced  up  and  down  the 
short  walk,  she  considered  the  disastrous  blunder  which  she 
had  made.  Not,  that  Grand'mere  recognized  the  blunder  ; 
on  the  contrary,  "It  was  the  marriage  the  most  convenable, 
the  couple  the  most  felicitous.  I  never  had  a  happier  idea," 
pondered  the  innocent  offender. 

The  girls  loitered,  but  Grand'mere  did  not  weary.  It  was 
their  time  to  loiter,  as  it  was  that  of  the  last  quinces  to  fall, 
the  beet-root  leaves  to  change  to  a  purple-black,  and  the 
brown  autumn  wall-flower  and  pale  lilac  and  white  leafless 
crocuses  to  offer  rich,  heavy  floral  incense,  or  wistful  floral 
weeds  for  the  year  which  was  a-dyiug. 

Grand'mere  had  a  heart  to  hold  all  the  seasons,  though 
she  loved  the  spring  best,  and  looked  a  little  pensively  and 
shrinkingly  on  the  autumn,  because  of  the  coming  winter, 
with  its  nipping  blasts,  stark  frosts,  and  winding-sheet  of 
snow.  For  the  old,  however  meek  and  resigned,  Avant  the 
images  of  life,  and  not  those  of  death,  and  turn  instinctively 
from  the  cold  to  the  heat,  from  the  shadow  for  which  there 
is  no  longer  need,  to  the  sunshine  which  can  not  bask  broad- 
ly enough  for  them.  Cut  Grand'mere  perfectly  understood 
and  submitted  to  the  fact  that,  while  the  budding  hope  of 
spring  was  for  her  consolation,  Yolande  in  her  own  spring 
must  be  unsympathetic,  and  must  stretch  after  the  distant 
and  unknown,  delighting  in  fulfilled  bounty  and  brooding 
repose.  She  could  pace  the  garden  road  contentedly  with 
Madame  Rougeole  as  a  safe  recipient  for  an  occasional  so- 
liloquy. She  did  not  wonder  that  the  empty  harvest-fields, 
with  their  purpose  now  finished  and  forsaken,  had  no  sad- 
ness for  Yolande,  and  that  she  could  stay  and  chatter  with 
Milly  Rolle,  as  the  mist  rose  from  the  slow  river,  carrying 
hoariness  to  the  very  uplands  of  the  Waiiste,  and  bearing 
nothing  but  the  seeded  stalks  of  heath-flowers,  inasmuch  as 
her  foot  had  trod  swiftly  among  the  cuckoo-flowers  and  the 
oxslips  where  they  wafted  the  sweeter  breath,  and  Avere  the 
more  richly  golden  for  pearls  of  May  deAv.  Grand'mere'a 
thoughts  Avere  all  tranquil  and  happy.  Even  when  they 
turned  to  the  spread  supper-table  within  the  house,  it  Avas 
with  a  pleasant  recognition  of  the  security,  sufficiency,  and 
domestic  joy  which  Avere  associated  with  the  homely  images 
of  strings  of  roasted  birds  and  rows  of  fried  trout,  and  such 
Medoc  as  could  be  got  in  England,  to  replace  indifferently 


232  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

the  brown  ale ;  with  the  jauntiness  of  Monsieur  and  the 
sombreuess  of  Madame  both  tempered  to  Grand'mere  by  the 
strongest,  simplest  devotion,  and  with  the  light  of  Yo- 
lande's  young  face  and  the  sociality  of  Milly  Rolle's  rattling 
tongue. 

A  hurried  tap  came  to  the  garden-door,  and  Grand'mere 
cried  gayly,  "  Who  goes  there  ?  Enter  the  grand  Mad- 
emoiselle," though  she  knew  the  shuffling  step  was  only  that 
of  Deborah  Pott,  who  had  cojtne  seeking  Mademoiselle  Yo- 
lande  to  look  over  her  task  of  burnishing  the  pewter  ves- 
sels in  the  house  before  they  should  be  submitted  to  the 
lynx  eyes  of  Prie.  Indeed,  to  relieve  Deb's  oppression  and 
anxiety  more  than  her  own,  Grand'mere  had  dispatched  the 
girl  to  look  out  for  her  young  mistress. 

But  when  Deborah  appeared  with  all  her  new  garments  fly- 
ing behind  her,  her  very  hair  standing  on  end  and  streaming 
back  from,  her  shock  head  under  her  loosened  cap,  with  her 
ungainly  arms  swinging,  her  splay  feet  clattering,  her  teeth 
chattering,  and  the  horror  of  her  news  bursting  from  her  fix- 
ed eyes  as  well  as  her  quivering  lips,  Grand'mere  was  arrest- 
ed and  petrified. 

"  Murder  ! — murder  !  old  Madame  !"  struggled  out  Deb, 
in  explanation  ;  "  young  madam — both  the  young  madams 
be  carried  away  and  undone." 


CHAPTER  XXII. 

THE   SIIOTTERY   COTTAGE   AT  BAY. 

"  A  see'd  them  with  my  own  eyes,"  Deb  went  on  to  ac- 
count for  her  wild  statement,  "  a-walking  and  a-talking  and 
a-laughing  like  childer,  coining  down  Pedlar's  Lane  with 
their  hands  full  o'  trash.  When  right  a'foot  o'  the  lane,  there 
was  summut  under  the  split  elm,  what  a' took  for  a  wagon, 
but  it  proved  no  wagon,  nobbut  a  charyot.  And  out  of  it 
sprang  a  tall  man  as  thof  he  were  awaiting  for  the  young 
mistresses,  and  he  spread  out  his  arms  and  stopped  the  pas- 
sengers. Hey  !  but  they  fell  a-cryin'  and  a-tryin'  to  pass 
him,  leastways  our  young  madam,  as  put  out  her  bits  of 
hands  and  pushed  him  back,  a'  ne'er  thought  she  had  such 
force." 

"  Tims  /"  cried  Grand'mere,  with  a  flash  from  her  grey 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  233 

eyes;  "  and  you  did  not  fly  to  her, and  fight  for  her!     She 
went  to  you,  my  big  girl." 

"  A'd  a  gone  as  sure  as  deeth,"  protested  Deb,  "  thof  a'd 
a-been  smashed  and  brained  and  hanged  and  quartered  ;  but 
with  that,  driver  and  postboys  came  swarming  out  from  the 
charyot  and  the.  elm.  One  'hind  and  the  rest  afore,  and 
closed  the  lasses  round,  while  my  gentleman  lifted  and  drag- 
ged them  intil  charyot.  And  off  they  drove  afore  a  poor 
body  would  say, '  By  your  leave.'  You  believe  me,  Madam 
Grand'mere?  "More  by  token  an'  a'  had  not  bidden  still, 
there  would  have  been  none  to  run  with  the  bad  news  and 
give  the  alarm." 

Grand'mere  took  no  comfort  from  the  conclusion,  and  fail- 
ed to  commend  Deb  for  her  discretion.  She  forgot  every 
thing  in  her  deadly  sickness  at  this  greatest  calamity  which 
had  befallen  her — a  calamity  to  which  death  itself  would  have 
been  light. 

"  The  Monsieur,  the  gentleman  !  Speak,  child,  and  kill  me  ! 
It  was  some  stranger,  some  audacious  traveler  for  a  frolic. 
Ouidd,  the  girls  will  be  free  again  before  this  ;  they  will  be 
skipping  home  to  us  now.  But  it  was  a  bad  jest,  without 
doubt,  still  only  a  jest ;  it  was  not — " 

"  Dunnot  take  on  so,"  besought  the  commiserating  Deb. 
"  Now,  I'se  tell  you  all,  and  not  keep  you  waiting.  It  were 
one  of  our  own  quality,  more's  the  pity,  as  left  the  castle  yes- 
terday. T'were  Mr.  George  hissen.  A'  know'd  him  by's 
clean-scraped  cheeks,  like  a  black-a-vised  wench's,  by  the 
color  of  s  sodgering  coat,  and  the  black  ribbon  round's  neck  ; 
t'other's  older  and  stouter,  and  wears  a  cravat,  and  a'  know'd 
him  by's  own  man  Master  Harry,  as  wears  the  two  watches 
and — waly  !  is  the  loosest  liver  in  the  parish — after  my  lord, 
and  my  lord's  brother." 

"  A  place  of  dragons !"  cried  poor  Grand'mere,  putting 
out  her  hand,  and  feeling  her  way  back  to  the  house,  as  if 
she  had  been  sun-struck  in  the  cool  autumn  sunset.  "  Go, 
girl,"  she  continued,  "go  to  the  rectory — and  tell  the  pas- 
tor his  daughter  is  gone,  how,  and  with  whom.  lie  is  not 
an^old  woman,  a  stranger  and  a  foreigner  like  me;  he  may 
load  a  pursuit,  and  my  son  will  follow  when  he  returns 
from  the  vcloutiire—z\\\  what  say  IV— from  the  Waaste, 
where  he  went  to  shoot  the  little  birds,  lie  will  feel  fa- 
therly now  that  his  stock  is  smitten  at  the  core     He  has  his 


234  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

honor,  his  human  feeling,  under  his  scheming  trader's  and 
emigre's  skin.  And  my  little  bird,  saved  from  the  bolt  of 
the  destroyer  only  to  fall  into  the  snare  of  the  fowler,  and 
to  die  twice  over,  dishonored  and  murdered !  Did  I  keep- 
the  child  cruelly  for  this  ?  My  selfish  greed  of  her,  is  it 
thus  heavily  punished  ?  Would  to  God  I  had  died  for 
thee,  Yolandette  !  "Would  to  God  thou  hadst  died  singly, 
securely,  in  the  house  of  thy  father,  tended  by  thy 
mother !" 

Bear  in  mind  that  these  "  good  old  times"  which  Wesley 
and  Whitfield,  and  at  a  later  date  Wilberforce,  troubled,  as 
the  prophet  Elijah  troubled  Israel,  were  times  when  the 
carrying  off  of  women,  and  the  hiding  of  them  in  lonely 
houses  and  remote  inns,  were  crimes  actually  possible  and 
occasionally  practiced  in  England.  Single  acts  of  barbar- 
ous unrighteousness  and  brutality  remained  to  impress 
upon  men  how  gradual  is  the  civilization  and  Christianiza- 
tion  of  a  nation — how  men  may  hang  up  their  broadswords 
and  stab  with  walking-rapiers,  how  great  towns  may  be 
taken  and  not  put  to  a  general  sack,  and  solitary  weak 
women  may  be  decoyed  or  lifted  away  by  foi*ce  from  the 
seclusion  of  paneled  parlors  and  the  publicity  of  tea- 
gardens,  to  be  cast  out  at  last  like  dogs.  It  was  a  far  more 
frightful  blow  for  an  honest  man  and  Avoman  to  hear  that  a 
young  daughter  had  been  seized  by  the  violence  of  man 
and  whirled  oft*  in  a  chariot,  than  that  she  had  quietly  sick- 
ened and  died  by  the  visitation  of  God.  If  she  had  been 
stopped  on  a  lonely  by-way,  a  rescue  was  hardly  to  be  ex- 
pected ;  if  on  a  frequented  high-road,  a  hundred  idle 
tongues  would  be  set  a-wagging,  and  would  babble  away 
the  good  name  and  the  fair  fame,  which  a  breath  could 
sully,  past  redemption  in  this  world.  At  the  best,  when 
the  last  unspeakable  wrong  was  escaped,  it  was  with  the 
bloom  and  the  dew  of  what  should  have  been  a  sacred 
frankness  and  fearlessness  of  girlhood  gone  forever.  No 
lot  was  left  to  the  victim  but  either  to  hang  her  head  and 
pine  for  her  misfortune,  or  to  brazen  out  its  disgrace  until 
the  ill  name  hanged  the  poor  dog  driven  desperate,  or  ^e 
brand  ate  into  and  tainted  the  soul  itself,  and  what  had 
begun  in  harsh  slander  ended  in  actual  wickedness.  Soon- 
er would  the  fondest  father  and  mother,  not  sold  to  the 
vile  tampering  with  evil  and  the  base  time-serving  which 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  235 

characterized  the  "good  old  times"  on  their  "worst  side — 
sooner  would  they  have  consented  to  see  the  favorite 
daughter,  the  house-pet,  lying  a  stony  figure  on  her  bier. 

France  was  not  so  different  from  England  in  this  respect 
that  Grand'mere  did  not  comprehend  the  full  bearing  of 
the  truth.  She  could  not  but  cry,  "  Would  to  God  I  had 
died,  or  Yolande  had  been  suffered  to  die  when  the  inno- 
cent death  of  girlhood  was  at  the  door,  rather  than  have 
lived  to  awaken  the  cruel  fancy  of  a  fine  gentleman  !" 

When  the  awful  news  spread,  it  was  not  Monsieur,  but 
the  rector,  who  was  found  to  be  from  home.  He  was 
away  preaching  an  assize  sermon,  thirty  miles  off,  at  the 
nick  of  time  when  one  of  his  cherished  daughters  had  be- 
come the  prey  of  worse  than  a  highwayman.  Her  sister 
Dolly  was  hardly  more  astounded,  incredulous,  helpless,  and 
hysterical  than  was  Madam  her  mother,  when  the  primitive 
messenger  rushed  past  Black  Jasper  with  his  solemn  mar- 
shaling, and  without  pause  or  preparation  did  her  best  to 
drop  a  shell  into  the  rectory  parlor,  where  Madam  was  no 
more  appropriately  occupied  than  seeking  to  win  Dolly 
from  a  lit  of  moping  by  a  dish  of  chocolate. 

"  An  it  please  you,  Pearson's  Madam — and  I'se  warrant 
it  will  please  none  of  you,"  began  Deb,  with  an  ominous 
shake  to  her  unruly  apron  and  voluminous  cap — "  Mistress 
Milly,  as  is  thick  with  our  young  madam  at  the  Shottery 
Cottage,  be  run  off  with,  along  with  t'other,  this  here 
blessed  sundown,  a'foot  o'  Pedlar's  Lane,  and  I  be  sent  to 
tell  you." 

"  Alake !  alake !  my  Milly,  and  papa  from  home ;  but 
sit  you  quiet,  my  Dolly,"  got  out  poor  Madam,  distract- 
edly. "  What  harm  have  the  horses  done  the  girls  ?  I 
have  cordials  and  linen  at  hand.  Conduct  me  to  my  child, 
my  good  girl ;  this  faiutuess  will  go  as  soon  as  I  have  set 
eyes  on  her." 

"Anan!  There  be  no  horse  in  the  play,  saving  the 
horses  in  the  charyot,  and  they  were  druve  by  worser  than 
horses,  marm  —  by  wicked  men.  Mr.  George  from  the 
castle,  he  had  a  hand  in  the  running  oil'  with  the  young 
madams.  A's  take  my  Bible  oath  on  what  a'  sce'd.  Bat 
as  to  leading  you  to  the  hiding  hole — it  were  not  the 
castle — he  knowed  a  better  trick  than  that,  and  he  bade 
driver  take  the  opposite  road.     To  find  that's  the  pother, 


230  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Madam;  and  that's  what  we  are  in  the  pickle  about  to- 
night at  the  Shottery  Cottage.  Old  madam  had  howped  as 
how  Pearson  were  the  man  to  raise  the  hue  and  cry — his 
own  daughter  being  gone  and  done  for." 

Milly  to  be  run  off  with  by  Mr.  George,  on  her  return  from 
the  most  ordinary  country  tramp ! — this  was  a  new  and 
thoroughly  bewildering  light  thrown  on  an  accident. 
Surely,  if  the  story  were  true,  it  could  only  be  in  the  way 
of  the  noblest  promotion  to  Milly,  though  the  banns  had  not 
been  published,  and  my  lady  would  cut  the  rash  couple  dead, 
and  not  hesitate  to  implicate,  in  the  unjustest  manner,  and 
thenceforth  to  hate  and  persecute  cruelly,  the  whole  rectory 
family. 

Notwithstanding  these  depressing  considerations,  the 
devoted,  silly  woman — good  and  gentle  as  she  was — was 
ready  to  plume  herself  on  her  daughter's  runaway  match 
with  a  member  of  the  proudest  quality.  But  there  were 
drawbacks  to  this  conviction.  It  was  odd  and  incongruous 
somehow  to  think  of  Mr.  George  as  one  of  a  passionate,  im- 
prudent young  couple.  Madam  at  the  rectory  was  not 
slow  in  believing  the  most  extravagant  compliment  to  her 
daughter's  charms ;  but  Mr.  George  had  not  been  any  way 
conspicuous  in  his  languid  mocking  attentions  to  his  rustic 
kinswoman,  unless  whispering  to  her  once  or  twice  in  cor- 
ners during  his  last  visit  to  the  castle  were  to  take  the  place 
of  the  elaborate  courtships  Madam  had  been  accustomed  to. 
Then  what  of  little  Dupuy,  the  French  ma'mselle,  whose 
concern  in  the  scandal  Madam  had  at  first  forgotten,  but 
whose  presence,  when  she  recalled  it,  was  an  additional 
stumbling-block  to  a  satisfactory  explanation  of  the  mys- 
tery ?  What  was  to  be  made  of  her  ?  Was  it  necessary 
to  spirit  her  from  the  scene,  create  a  greater  sensation, 
and  complicate  the  matter  for  the  mere  purpose  of  doing 
honor  to  Milly's  foolish  liking  for  her  by  electing  her  to  be 
witness  and  best  maid  on  the  interesting  occasion,  in  room 
of  the  pouting,  flouncing  Dolly  ?  And,  oh  dear !  if  Milly 
were  mad  enough,  and  the  Honorable  George  bad  enough, 
simply  to  drive  about  the  country  to  show  themselves  to 
the  public,  without  any  more  proper  protector  and  compan- 
ion than  Milly's  French  friend  !  In  this  light  the  calamity 
was  infinitely  worse  than  the  failure  in  the  summer  dish  of 
gooseberry  fool,  or  the  tearing  of  the  rector's  surplice.     It 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  237 

would  be  beyond  Madam's  power,  even  if  it  came  within 
her  duty,  to  conceal  this  scrape  from  the  rector.  For  once 
in  her  life  the  timid,  distraught,  ignorant  lady  would  sound- 
ly rate  her  dear  girl,  Milly,  had  she  but  her  tongue  on  her 
again. 

At  the  Shottery  Cottage  the  dreadful  disaster  which  had 
befallen  the  Dupuy  family  worked  in  the  peculiar  way  ad- 
versity sometimes  works  in  turning  the  world  of  character 
upside  down,  and  doing  away  with  previous  impressions. 

To  begin  with  the  kitchen.  Big  Prie,  having  resisted 
the  first  frantic  inclination  to  set  out  after  the  most  monstrous 
of  robbers,  subsided  tamely  into  a  shocked,  appalled  elderly 
woman,  shaking  all  over,  and  even  whimpering  feebly  for  the 
loss  of  generous,  guileles  young  Madame.  She  left  it  to 
the  young  blood  of  the  raw  Deb  Pott  to  rise  to  the  occa- 
sion, and  show  a  genius  not  only  for  open-eyed  observation, 
but  for  staunch  adherence  to  a  trail,  and  daring  excursions 
right  and  left  to  authenticate  it.  If  Deb  did  not  rise  like  a 
phoenix,  certainly  in  one  single  hour  she  was  drawn  from 
her  slough  of  brutal  ignorance  into  an  uncouth  but  very 
genuine  woman  ;  the  orphan  and  drudge  was  transplanted 
into  the  solid  if  somewhat  rough  ground-work  of  a  good, 
faithful,  rudely-sagacious  creature.  Prie,  who  in  her  gaunt 
grufthess  could  not  bend  or  mold  to  new  requirements,  or 
create  resources  for  unthought-of  necessities,  at  once,  by 
the  law  of  nature,  succumbed  and  deferred.  But  it  must 
be  said  she  was  too  miserable  about  the  daughter  of  the 
house  to  be  jealous  of  the  elevation  of  her  subordinate. 
She  only  dully  wondered  at  "  her  as  couldn't  ha'  telled  her 
right  hand  from  her  left,  or  a  farthing  candle  from  a  four- 
penny  mold,  growing  so  spry  all  of  a  suddent."  Now  and 
then  she  would  give  a  fling  of  aimless,  peevish  rage  when 
Deb,  who  was  stolid  and  coarse  though  honest,  and  had  the 
making  of  a  noble  woman  in  her,  dared,  with  gross  want  of 
delicate  tact,  to  compare  their  pure,  kidnapped,  concealed 
ma'mselle  to  the  wretched  women  (and  Deb  had  heard  of 
many  of  them  even  in  her  short  life)  who,  with  scant  cere- 
mony and  charity,  were  sentenced  to  a  fatally  blighted 
life. 

Madame  Dupuy  was  passive,  and  stricken  dumb  in  her 
insulted  and  outraged  womanhood.  Her  thunder  had  been 
all  spent  in  the  fine  weather,  so  that  there  was  no  strength 


238  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

left  in  her  for  the  storm ;  she  did  not  reproach  Grand'mere 
with  short-sighted  magnanimity,  she  did  not  even  denounce 
the  perfidious  English  and  the  licentious  quality:  she  re- 
viled the  world  and  reflected  on  Providence  no  more. 

It  was  Monsieur,  the  man  of  the  world,  the  cynical  phi- 
losopher, whose  sallow  cheek  grew  green,  grew  black,  who 
stormed  and  foamed  and  turned  his  back,  and  wept  hot  tears 
like  sparks  of  fire.  "  The  mother's  child,  the  old  woman's 
darling,  her  picture  if  we  lost  her — and  I  was  not  there  to 
save  the  little  one !  But  I  will  have  justice  coute  que  cotite. 
I  know,  though  I  am  a  roturier  of  a  Huguenot  tradesman, 
that  there  is  one  justice  for  the  quality  and  another  for  the 
commonalty  in  this  fine  country  of  England.  But  there  is 
justice,  such  as  it  is,  and  the  quality  are  left  to  themselves 
sometimes,  and  cry  halte  Id  I  at  each  other's  sins,  and  hold 
them  up  to  open  punishment." 

It  was  Grand'mere,  the  sweet-tempered,  buoyant-spirited 
old  gentlewoman,  whose  brave  heart  failed  her,  whose  ten- 
der conscience  told  her  terrible  things,  whose  firm  faith 
reeled  under  the  shock.  Grand'mere  took  cognizance  of 
all  her  own  confiding  rashness  which  had  set  at  nought  the 
mother's  jealous  foresight  and  stern  precaution,  what  she  call- 
ed her  romanesque  folly,  which  had  brought  ruin  to  her  family. 
She  knew  that  Monsieur  could  not  be  silent  on  his  injury, 
but  was  forced  to  make  grievous  explanations  and  furious 
inquiries,  and  with  her  quick  wit  she  saw  that  the  world  of 
Sedge  Pond  did  him  monstrous  wrong.  Because  he  was 
yellow  and  sodden  in  his  heaviness,  instead  of  bluff  and 
hearty,  because  his  expletives  were  safely  strange  and  incom- 
prehensible, and  his  best  English  accent  worse  than  that  of 
any  Welshman  or  Scotchman,  because  his  spluttering  frenzy 
was  in  as  great  a  contrast  to  what  would  have  been  a  John 
Bull's  choking  dignity  as  it  was  to  his  own  wonted  half- 
sardonic  blandness — because  of  all  this,  the  villagers  thrust 
their  tongues  into  their  cheeks,  and  derided  the  unhappy 
man.  With  a  brutal  irreverence  for  human  nature  and  in- 
fidelity to  it,  they  called  the  Avhole  story  a  French  manoeu- 
vre ;  and  for  Yolande,  who  had  been  their  sister  of  chari- 
ty, and  over  whom,  when  they  thought  her  on  her  death- 
bed, they  had  shaken  their  heads  with  some  stupid  approach 
to  awe  and  tendernoss,  they  now  called  her  a  French  slut ; 
and  the  only  person  to  be  pitied  in  their  view  of  the  affair 


THE   UUGUENOT   FAMILY.  239 

was  the  idle,  set-up  hussy,  the  parson's  daughter,  who  would 
go  gadding  in  indifferent  company. 

This  wanton  misconception  filled  Grand'mere  with  dis- 
may. True,  the  object  of  it  was  to  the  world  only  a  mid- 
dle-aged, scheming  man,  with  the  doubtfulness  of  a  cloud 
over  his  interests  and  engagements ;  but  he  was  to  her  a 
son,  her  only  son,  who  had  been  devoted  and  dutiful — too 
loyal,  indeed,  to  breathe  a  whisper  of  Grand'mere's  fro- 
ward  interposition  for  the  purpose  of  opposing  his  and  my 
Lady  Rolle's  sovereign  will,  which  had  it  been  accomplished 
would  have  at  least  placed  Yolande  under  powerful  protec- 
tion. 

Grand'mere  contemplated"  her  Hubert  setting  out  single- 
handed,  in  the  darkness  of  the  unprovoked  deadly  destruc- 
tion of  the  family  peace,  to  search  for  a  lost  daughter,  his 
only  child.  She  had  a  lamentable  vision  of  Yolande,  her 
shy,  modest,  sensitive  child,  brought  in  a  moment  to  a  crisis 
of  fear,  grief,  and  shame,  quaking  and  quivering,  and  wild 
with  distraction  of  unbelief. 

"My  daughter-in-law,"  besought  Grand'mere,  creeping 
and  clinging  to  Madame,  with  her  voice  broken  and  shiver- 
ed to  a  vibrating  shrillness,  "  chide  me,  accuse  me,  that  my 
God  may  spare  me,  and  be  spared  to  me.  I  had  sooner  know 
myself  a  miserable  culprit,  aud  consent  to  lay  down  my  grey 
hairs  in  a  coflin  of  infamy,  than  think  that  He  had  forsaken 
the  child  who  trusted  in  Him.  My  God  !  keep  her  from 
thinking  so.  For  the  dark  places  of  the  earth  are  full  of 
horrible  cruelty,  and  Thou  knowest  and  sufferest  it.  Inno- 
cent women  have  been  foully  maltreated  and  barbarously 
done  to  death  ere  now  in  Thy  sight  and  hearing,  and  Thou 
hast  not  interfered  and  opened  the  earth  to  swallow  up  their 
persecutors  and  murderers.  What  can  we  do?  Hearest 
thou,  Philippine  !  Blame  me,  condemn  me  !  lest  I  or  the 
child  curse  God  and  die !" 

But  Madame  remained  true  to  her  faith,  her  instinct  and 
education  ;  her  trust  in  God  and  her  homage  to  the  old 
mother  forming  an  oasis  of  docility  and  gentleness  in  the 
arrogance  and  violent  antagonism  of  her  nature.  In  its  in- 
spiration Madame  could  even  argue  and  plead  with  the 
guileless  guile  of  love  :  "  No,  no,  little  mother,  thou  wert  al- 
ways our  good  angel,  hers  and  ours.  Not  true,  ma  m&re  ; 
if  the  wolves  had  not  found  one  way  of  eating  us  up,  they 


240  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

would  have  found  another.  Courage,  Grand'mere,  call  back 
thy  forces  under  the  good  God.  Poor,  miserable  ones  that 
we  are,  we  hang  upon  thee.  Thy  son,  thy  daughter  Yo- 
lande — more  yours  than  my  husband's  and  mine — who  will 
cure  her  hurt  and  wash  away  her  stain,  if  she  survive  and 
return  to  us,  save  the  wise,  tender  old  woman?  Thou 
knowest  that  I  am  but  a  rod  in  pickle  at  the  best."  Sus- 
tained and  raised  on  the  strong  tower  of  devotion  and  duty, 
Madame  in  the  hour  of  trial  thus  re-assured  and  comforted 
Grand'mere  :  "  '  The  wrrath  of  man  shall  praise  him' — shall 
a  Huguenot  doubt  it  ?  In  the  a'igues-mortes  our  women 
suffered  the  utmost,  but  it  was  only  their  bodies,  which  the 
Apostle  called  vile  in  the  beginning.  After  it  would  have 
been  all  over  with  the  women  of  the  world,  who  have  no 
souls  to  speak  of,  the  souls  of  our  saints  soared  away  out  of 
great  tribulation,  with  wings  as  of  eagles,  like  snow-birds 
washed  white  in  the  stream  of  His  blood,  to  hover  round 
the  great  white  throne.  The  soul  of  Yolandette !  how  can 
the  caitiff  so  much  as  smirch  it  with  a  finger-spot,  Grand'- 
mere ?" 

Monsieur  had  driven  away  from  the  ale-house  in  one  of 
the  high  yellow  gigs  of  the  time,  so  crazy  an  equipage  that 
there  was  more  danger  of  its  being  tilted  up,  dashing  Mon- 
sieur out,  and  leaving  his  busy  brains  on  the  highway,  than 
of  his  overtaking  the  chariot. 

After  the  night  of  misfortune  had  drawn  a  veil  of  autumn 
darkness  over  the  confusion  and  dismay  which  prevailed, 
and  another  day  had  risen,  Grand'mere  received  several 
acknowledgments  of  the  evil  which  had  befallen  her.  The 
first  was  a  card  from  Lady  Rolle,  who  had  not  more  than 
reached  the  first  country-house  on  the  line  of  her  magnifi- 
cently slow  and  troublesome  progress.  It  contained  only 
the  lines — 

"  You  would  not  accept  my  proposal,  Madam,  and  you  see 
what  has  come  of  your  insolent  integrity.  I  wash  my  hands 
of  the  business.  My  son  has  merely  done  what  might  have 
been  looked  for  from  him  to  you,  and  I  suppose  now  you 
expect  me  to  interfere  and  remedy  the  mischief;  but  you 
will  find  yourself  mightily  mistaken.  As  you  and  the  hura- 
bled  minx  have  made  your  bed,  so  you  can  lie  on't.  I  have 
told  you  I  wash  my  hands  of  the  business.     I  have  to  add 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  241 

that  I  never  repent  of  my  decisions.     Your  obedient  ser- 
vant, Audrey  Rolle." 

Finely  strung  and  keenly  susceptible  as  Grand'mere's  tem- 
perament was,  she  had  no  pained  resentment  to  spare  for 
this  vindictive  taunt. 

"God  have  pity  on  you,  miladi,  who  thus  trample  upon 
me,  who  am  cast  down,"  she  said,  dismissing  the  subject ; 
"  for  the  great  Lord  God  repents  Him  sometimes  of  the 
misery  whieh  sinners  bring  upon  themselves." 

Then  Mr.  Lushington  was  shown  into  the  Shottery  Cot- 
tage parlor,  his  very  brow  under  his  curls  suffused  with 
warm  red,  and  at  the  same  time  beaded  with  cold  perspira- 
tion. His  round  eyes,  bedded  in  fat,  were  struggling  in 
their  tight  sockets  for  the  first  time  in  the  course  of  their 
existence  ;  his  firm  calves  were  shaking  like  jelly  :  he  stood 
there  an  honest  man  in  the  grievous  awkwardness  and  gen- 
uine distress  of  having  been  betrayed  and  shamed  by  those 
whom  he  had  delighted  to  honor,  and  whose  representative 
he  had  been  proud  to  be. 

"  Madam,"  he  said,  retreating  instead  of  advancing  when 
he  saw  that  Grand'mere  did  not  look  angrily  at  him,  but 
looked  only  a  pitiably-stricken  woman,  "  I'd  as  lief  touch  a 
live  coal  as  take  your  hand.  Couldn't,  raley,  Madam  ;  it  ud 
burn  me  to  the  bone.  Law  !  to  think  our  family  should 
have  been  so  left  to  themselves  as  to  put  a  finger  on  Ma'm- 
sello  that  my  lady  our  own  mother  noticed  and  had  up  at 
the  castle.  But  Ma'mselle  were  too  good  for  our  rackets, 
and  we're  more  left  to  ourselves  than  ever.  It  is  my  solemn 
conviction,  old  Madame  Dupuy,  that  we  are  going  right 
out  of  hand  to  perdition.  Sharp's  the  word,  and  here's  the 
sign.  The  last  time  I  was  here,  you  mind,  I  was  apolo- 
gizing profoundly  for  evening  the  lass  to  the  likes  of  my 
company,  and  her  too  good  for  this  world  and  fit  for  the 
company  of  the  angels.  Yet  the  modest  saint  bethought 
herself  of  me,  and  sent  me  a  kind,  sweet  wench's  mes- 
sage, 'I  wish  with  all  my  heart  I  were  his  little  daughter,' 
And  I  wish  the  same,  miss,  answer  I,  though  I  am  not 
worthy.  God  sen'  she  may  not  want  a  friend.  Bat  I  af- 
fright you,  Madam,  as  I  honestly  credit,  without  cause. 
I  crave  your  pardon  ;  and  I  came  here  with  another  in- 
tention." 

T. 


242  THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

"You  help  me  by  your  kindness  of  heart,  Maitre  Lush- 
ington,  for  I  trust  your  goodness,"  said  Grand'mere. 

"  I  only  came  here  to  tell  you  that  our  Mr.  George,  let 
him  be  a  selfish  sneering  rake,  though  I  should  not  say  it,, 
and  have  never  said  it  before,  is  not  a  devil  outright  to 
abuse  his  ill-gotten  power  to  the  worst.  There  is  proof  of 
it  in  his  carrying  away  young  Madam  from  the  rectory  along 
with  your  lass  to  keep  her  company  and  blindfold  the  pub- 
lic. Rolle,  who  provokes  t'other  as  a  mastiff  worries  a  bull 
terrier,  has  been  twitting  him  with  Ma'mselle's  fine  scorn 
and  independence,  and  what  not,  when  he  tried  on  his 
game  in  forgathering  with  her  and  Parson  Philip's  gay  mad- 
am, and  he  has  snatched  her  beyond  reach  to  play  it  out  at 
closer  quarters.  But  he  is  not  a  brute  or  a  devil,  is  Mr. 
George  ;  he  and  his  order  are  light  of  mind  at  this  time  of 
day ;  the  whole  set  be  never  clean  in  earnest  unless  on  the 
rights  of  the  quality  and  the  English." 

"It  is  always  the  English  for  the  English,  my  good 
friend,"  put  in  Grand'mere,  to  fill  up  a  pause  occasioned  by 
the  superabundence  of  her  visitor's  fat. 

"  Yes,  by  the  Billy,  if  you  will  believe  it,  Mr.  George 
himself  fires  finely  on  that.  A  proud  fool  have  I  been  to 
hear  him  and  Rolle  speak  up  in  Parliament,  at  'lections,  and 
when  they  were  trouncing  the  French — no  offense — doing 
honor  to  the  old  stock.  I'm  fain  to  own  it  were  all  the  hon- 
or they  did  it,  for  I  care  nought,  not  I,  for  their  squalling 
farrin  singers,  no  better  than  they  should  be,  their  bits 
of  brass  and  rags  of  tapestry,  and  their  cracked  brown  pict- 
ers  in  ship-loads,  with  ne'er  a  red  and  white  cheek,  a  blue 
sky,  or  a  cornicoper  of  gold  in  the  lot.  I  leave  that  to  a 
polished,  knavish  blackguard  like  my  lord's  Tony,  or  an. 
impudent  scoundrel  like  Mr.  George's  Harry,  who  pretends 
to  be  as  thick  in  the  plot  for  rickety  furniture  and  rusty  iron 
as  his  master.  The  dickens!  when  I  think  of  the  power  of 
grand  sticks  of  trees  and  heavy  stacks  of  corn  they've  cost 
my  lady,  and  how  they  and  the  desperate  evil  of  play  are  at 
the  bottom  of  the  orders  to  sell  out  every  back-going  tenant 
and  press  every  yeoman  who  will  pay  with  his  last  groat 
afore  he  will  quit  the  fields  where  his  childer  have  been 
born  and  their  feyther  afore  them,  I  could  find  it  in  my 
heart  to  smash  and  burn  the  toys." 

"  Oh,"  said  Grand'mere,  more  to  herself  than  to  her  com- 


THE   HUGUENOT   FA3IILY.  243 

panion,  "  how  these  qnality  sacrifice  their  peace  of  mind  for 
draughts  of  pleasure  that  burn  but  never  satisfy." 

4<  Howsomever,"  Master  Lushington  went  on,  "  you  have 
heard  what  Mr.  George  is — a  petty  mater  in  your  native 
tongue,  as  I've  heard  often  enough  gabbled  to  little  profit, 
and  no  reflection  on  you,  old  Madam.  This  adventure  is 
but  a  piece  of  wicked  play  to  him,  and  there  being  a  couple 
of  ladies,  you  may  depend  upon  it  he's  gone  no  farrer  than 
to  a  friend's  empty  house,  or  to  a  quiet  country  inn,  within 
a  circuit  of  ten  miles.  Well,  but  Ma'mselle  has  sense  and 
spirit,  as  well  as  beauty  and  honesty,  and  will  resist  our 
gentleman's  becks  and  bows,  and  gifts  of  smuggled  silks 
and  jewelery,  by  way  of  atonement  and  peace-offering. 
So,  cheer  up,  for  while  she  is  amusing  him  with  the  stubborn- 
ness of  her  virtuous  resentment,  she  will  get  a  letter  sent  by 
a  safe  hand,  or  succeed  in  screeching  out  of  a  winder,  or 
waving  a  kerchief  to  a  friend.  What  will  remain  then  but 
the  fright  and  the  fine  word  of  being  run  away  with  ?" 

"Ah,  but  the  fright  is  the  smallest  part  of  the  evil,  Maitre 
Lushington,"  broke  in  Grand'mere. 

"  Nay,  but  my  tongue  butters  no  parsnips,"  added  he, 
bluntly  ;  "  I  own  candidly  it  is  none  of  a  fine,  but  a  very 
ugly  word  ;  let  that  satisfy  you  that  I  speak  the  truth.  Yet 
I  can  tell  you  this — that  plain  folk  know  the  quality  and 
our  family,  and  will  not  come  down  thumping  hard  on  a 
brush  as  might  not  be  escaped.  One  thing  I'm  woundy 
glad  of — that  I  could  not  make  up  my  mind  to  give  our  fam- 
ily the  go-by,  and  leave  it  to  shift  for  itself,  after  a  life's  serv- 
ice, till  the  last  moment.  For  so  it  have  left  me  the  coat 
which  will  get  me  a  hearing  and  an  entrance  at  a  hunder 
turns,  to  which  Monseer  dare  not  set  his  nose,  or  come  back 
blooded  in  that  ere  feater.  Wear  the  Rolle  livery,  in  order 
to  ferret  out  a  Rolle  and  his  misdeed  ?  Not  a  doubt  of  it, 
Madame  Dupuy.  I  wish  to  goodness  I  had  allers  done  it 
as  much  credit.  Moreover,  by  your  leave,  I  may  come  down 
lighter  than  another,  for  all  our  sakes,  on  the  sinner — say 
than  Monseer  might  be  frantic  enough  to  do,  when  he  came 
to  small-swords  or  pocket-pistols  with  Mr.  Georg< — he's  a 
clever  man  at  that  practice — if  Monseev's  life  were  worth  a 
farden's  purchase,  whether  he  won  or  lost  the  dool.  But 
there  is  no  chance  of  such  a  meeting,  old  .Madam — nut  the 
least  in  the  world  ;  and  as  for  danger  to  an  old  soldier  o\'  a 


244  THE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY. 

butler  like  me,  hoity-toity !  there  is  a  lining  to  this  coat" — 
and  Mr.  Lushington  fingered  some  papers  in  his  pocket  im- 
pressively— "  which  it  dunnot  become  me  to  mention,  but  in 
consideration  of  them  dirty  papers,  my  lady  herself,  in  her 
worst  tantrums,  will  not  have  me  arrested,  or  caned,  or  set 
in  the  stocks,  neither  for  contempt  of  authority,  default  of 
service,  or  misuse  of  livery.     Pay  no  heed,  madam." 

The  effect  of  worthy  Mr.  Lushington's  weighty  practical 
arguments,  delivered  with  much  elaboration  and  expense  of 
wind,  was  a  happy  one  on  Grand'mere.  The  strait  was  a 
sore  one,  but  even  one  such  stanch  friend  was  not  to  be 
despised. 

Mr.  Hoadley's  ardent  friendship  actuated  him  in  an  oppo- 
site fashion.  He  renounced  Lord  Rolle's  chaplaincy,  or  was 
dismissed  from  it,  he  could  not  be  quite  sure  which,  the  mo- 
ment that  the  news  of  the  escapade  found  Lord  Rolle,  per- 
force, escorting  his  mother,  with  a  shocking  bad  grace,  to 
town,  having  commanded  the  attendance  of  both  chaplain 
and  physician  to  share  the  burden  of  my  lady's  tempers  and 
whims. 

Mr.  Hoadley  had  walked  unsummoned  and  unannounced 
into  the  library  of  the  great  house  at  which  my  lady  had 
stopped,  where  in  studious  affectation  of  study,  and  in  night- 
gown and  slippers,  Lord  Rolle  was  to  be  seen  immersed  and 
engrossed  in  the  contents  of  an  ebony  cabinet  full  of  inven- 
tories, household  books,  and  recipes  which  he  was  privileged 
to  examine. 

';  My  lord,  I  have  come  to  tell  you,  as  a  mau  and  a  Chris- 
tian— "  burst  out  Mr.  Hoadley. 

"  My  good  fellow,"  interrupted  Lord  Rolle,  quickly,  while 
he  carefully  marked  his  place  with  his  tooth-pick,  "  as  a  man 
and  a  Christian,  I  have  seen  for  some  time  that  we  don't 
suit.  There  is  a  check  for  your  salary.  Say  no  more  about 
it.  Don't  bore  me,  and  oh !  pray,  don't  bore  Fidele.  You 
know,  Fiddle  can  not  forgive  a  brutal  entrance.  See  how 
she  snuffs  and  snarls,"  pointing  to  his  weasel-faced  satellite 
in  her  basket.  "  I  doubt  if  she  would  ever  have  taken  you 
into  favor  again,  and  I  can't  abide  any  of  my  people  failing 
to  be  on  good  terms  with  my  dog  of  dogs.  But  before  you 
go,  you  who  have  not  sat  so  late,  reverend  sir,  or  tried  your 
poor  eyes  so  prodigiously  with  polite  society — though  you 
used  to  be  fond  enough  of  a  spare  seat  at  the  faro-table, 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  245 

till  the  rhino  failed,  or  you  thought  to  try  the  pious  dodge 
— hey  !  Parson  Hoadley ! — lend  me  your  aid  to  make  out 
this  word '  consumed — consummate  coxcomb.' ' 

" '  Consomme  of  cockscombs,'  my  lord ;  I  was  not  aware 
that  your  eyes  were  so  affected.  I  take  leave  to  inform 
you  that  I  shall  go  before  the  next  justice  and  depose  to 
what  I  know  of  this  infamous  act  of  treachery  and  violence, 
and  compel  him — yes,  my  lord,  compel  him  to  take  steps 
to  bring  the  atrocious  perpetrator — were  he  the  Duke  of 
York  or  of  Gloucester — under  the  law's  dreadest  penalty 
for  a  detestable  crime." 

"  Softly,  my  man,"  said  Rolle,  quite  sweetly,  drawing  his 
fingers  through  his  scratch  wig,  then  letting  them  drop  in  a 
pose  among  the  lace  of  his  cravat.  "  Don't  you  think  a 
magistrate  who  would  send  one  of  the  royal  dukes  to  swing 
at  Tyburn  would  be  a  rarer  monster  even  than  Sir  William 
Gascoigne  ?  '  Consomme,'  was  it  ?  '  consomme  of  cocks- 
combs'— a  charming  disb,  I  am  sure.  "What  a  ridiculous 
mistake  I  had  gone  near  to  perpetrate  ;  ha !  ha !  ha !  it  tick- 
les me  to  think  of  it — appropriate  too.  '  Consumed  cox- 
comb,' ha!  ha!  yaw!  yaw!  Good-day  to  you,  Parson 
Hoadley ;  I  have  the  honor  to  wish  you  a  very  good-day, 


sir." 


Parson  Hoadley  did  not  credit  that  his  blood  was  boiling 
when  he  told  Grand'mere,  in  the  poor  fellow's  magnilo- 
quence, that  he  had  not  called  down  the  vengeance  of  Heav- 
en on  his  patrons,  but  that  in  obedience  to  His  orders  he 
had  prayed  for  his  mortal  enemies.  Also  he  declared  that 
he  would  go  to  the  world's  end  armed  with  the  Word  of 
God  alone,  to  reclaim  and  restore  the  victim,  however  in- 
fatuated and  perverted,  whom  he  would  not  trust  himself  to 
name. 

Yet  virtually  he  named  her,  and  the  question  remains 
whether  it  was  characterisitic  of  Mr.  Hoadley's  tempera- 
ment or  of  the  views  which  he  had  imbibed  and  held  man- 
fully ever  afterward,  that  while  he  had  loved  Yolande 
Dupuy  with  as  true  a  fervor  of  man's  love  as  ever  at  once 
troubled  and  dignified  a  face  now  keen,  now  li>tlo>s,  he 
could  yet  term  her  a  victim,  while  his  honor  Mr.  Lushington 
would  not  name  her,  and  could  infer  infatuation  and  per- 
version on  her  part,  and  reclaiming  and  recovery  on  his 
own. 


246  THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

Grand'mere  loved  this  young  man,  and  understood  him 
better  than  he  understood  himself.  She  was  sunk  under 
her  torture,  but  she  could  not  stand  this  tone,  bred  of  con- 
ceit, irritability,  weakness,  and  faithlessness  to  human  na- 
ture. She  could  have  stamped  with  her  high-heeled  shoe, 
and  cried,  "  Go,  then,  give  her  up.  Be  the  first  to  doubt 
and  turn  upon  her,  under  pretense  of  righteousness  and  char- 
ity. It  was  always  the  way  with  the  poet,  with  the  priest, 
and  the  Levite." 

And  now  there  were  only  the  Gages  of  the  Mall  to  en- 
counter. The  Gages  were  at  too  great  a  distance  to  be 
roused  and  appalled  by  the  earliest  report  of  the  Dupuys' 
calamity ;  but  the  old  squire  would  doubtless  take  the 
trouble  to  ride  over  to  the  Shottery  Cottage,  and  condole 
from  the  bottom  of  his  heart  with  the  distracted  family. 

Grand'mere  could  not  refrain  from  reflecting  a  little  bitter- 
ly on  the  Gages,  and  weaving  unpalatable,  unwholesome 
fancies  concerning  them.  The  father  and  the  son  might 
have  saved  the  Dupuys  a  world  of  terror,  sorrow,  and  hu- 
miliation by  meeting,  as  frankly  as  it  had  been  made,  what 
was  in  Grand'mere's  eyes  her  perfectly  modest,  discreet, 
suitable  plan  of  disposing  of  Yolande.  Had  the  bowls  been 
permitted  to  roll  fairly,  long  ere  this  a  gracious  affection,  a 
pure  and  honorable  love,  would  have  sprung  Tip  and  flour- 
ished under  the  most  serene  and  sacred  countenance  and 
shield,  and  united  the  young  pair  in  indissoluble  bonds. 
Not  even  a  llolle  of  the  castle  would  have  ventured  to  dis- 
turb the  peace,  and  trespass  on  the  dignity  of  young  Mad- 
am Gage  of  the  Mall,  nay,  of  the  contracted  wife  of  young 
Squire  Gage — a  different  person  in  the  neighborhood  from 
Ma'mselle,  the  French  silk-weaver's  daughter  at  the  Shot- 
tery Cottage. 

Again,  Squire  Gage  and  his  son,  good  as  they  were,  might 
in  their  English  surliness  hold  themselves  excused  for  feel- 
ing thankful  that  they  had  resisted  a  temptation,  and  been 
saved  from  a  pitfall.  How  could  they  be  supposed  to  be 
nobler  than  the  young  pastor  in  exalting  the  goods  which 
they  had  been  the  first  to  decry  by  their  rejection  ?  Would 
they  not  rather  twitch  the  collars  of  their  coats,  rub  their 
hands,  and  talk  of  foreign  fashions,  and  their  being  well  quit 
of  them  ?  Few  men  or  women  in  the  world  were  more  free 
from  spite  and  rancor  than  Grand'mere,  but  in  the  mystery, 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  247 

mortification,  and  misery  of  Yolande's  forced  elopement,  she 
did  bear  a  grudge  against  the  Gages,  against  Fletcher  of 
Madeley's  friend,  the  devout,  charitable  old  squire  of  the 

Mall. 


CHAPTER  XXIII. 

THE   DEMOLITION   OF   A   CHAISE   AND   A   PLOT. 

"  La  !  Ma'mselle,  don't  you  see  Mr.  George  is  only  play- 
ing a  prank  ?"  protested  Milly  Rolle,  as  she  crossed  her 
arms,  leaned  back  in  the  chariot,  and  took  the  matter  very 
coolly. 

"  It  is  no  pleasantry  to  me,"  plead  Yolande.  "  Arrest  the 
horses,  Monsieur;  let  us  go.  It  is  necessary  that  I  return 
to  Grand'mere  within  the  hour  ;  she  will  not  sit  down  to  the 
little  supper  without  me.  I  do  not  comprehend  how  you 
can  take  us  away  in  this  manner, malgr'e  nous.  But  I  ask 
you,  as  a  great  favor,  that  you  put  me  down  this  moment, 
and  I  shall  walk  home  without  difficulty." 

"  I  am  vastly  sorry  to  refuse  you  a  favor,"  professed  Mr. 
George,  with  a  great  show  of  courtesy  ;  "  'pon  my  honor  I 
am ;  but  you  see  I  have  been  at  the  trouble  to  contrive  and 
carry  out  this  adventure  in  order  to  get  better  acquainted 
with  so  charming  a  mademoiselle  as  you  are,  and  with  my 
kinswoman  Miss  Milly.  I  should  lose  my  end  entirely  if  I 
gave  in  to  your  polite  request.  So  come  now,  little  Dupuy, 
ask  any  other  favor,  and,  by  George,  you  shall  have  it  even  to 
my  whole  stock  of  tabac  cV  etrennes  and  orange-flower  bou- 
quet, were  it  only  to  prove  how  gallant  I  can  be  when  I  have 
the  opportunity.  At  the  same  time  consider  how  I  have 
flattered  you  two  young  ladies,  for  I  tell  you  a  false  step  in 
this  affair  may  land  me  in  Newgate;  therefore  I  pray  you 
propose  to  your  humble  servant  something  more  reasonable." 

u  Oh,  lie!  you  naughty  man,  to  speak  of  yourself  and 
Newgate  in  the  same  breath,"  said  Milly,  fanning  away  the 
idea  with  her  pocket-handkerchief,  lor  she  had  made  im- 
mense progress  in  the  art  of  fashionable  conversation  and 
its  attendant  airs. 

"I  am  as  serious  as  a  parson, Madam,"  answered  Mr. 
George,  carelessly  ;  "  can't  you  sec  Tin  dressed  for  a  6ght?" 

Mr.  George  was  aware  that  there  was  some  risk  in  his  be- 


248  THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

ing  caught  sight  of,  besides  that  of  his  amusement  being  Sftis- 
pected  and  interfered  with,  at  a  little  distance  from  home ; 
and  that  he  rnisjht  have  a  chance  of  bein^  confounded  with 
some  of  the  wild  officers  of  the  period  he  wore  a  suit  in  which 
he  only  appeared  on  special  occasions  in  the  country — a  mil- 
itia uniform  of  red,  with  buff  vest  and  gold  buttons.  These 
so  dazzled  the  eyes  of  silly,  susceptible  Milly  Rolle,  that  she 
fancied  she  could  go  to  the  world's  end  and  share  danger 
and  adversity  with  so  splendid  a  gentleman,  who  was  at  the 
same  time  so  elegant  and  pleasaut.  He  was  like  her  poor 
dear  brother  Philip  in  his  regimentals,  only  Philip  was  sol- 
id and  tiresomely  in  earnest  for  so  young  a  man,  and,  though 
fond  of  his  sisters,  was  given  to  contradicting  them  flatly. 
And  Mr.  George  was  a  mighty  different  man  from  poor  papa 
in  his  rusty  gown  and  cassock  and  old-fashioned  bands.  Still 
her  papa  would  miss  her  when  he  came  back  from  the  assize, 
were  it  only  in  the  way  of  catching  up  her  words  and — not 
snarling  at  them,  her  papa  was  too  clever  and  good  to  snarl 
— taking  her  off  and  looking  down  on  her  intellectually,  as 
Milly  had  quite  wit  enough  to  see  that  he  did.  Indeed  she 
did  not  love  the  disparaging  treatment  even  when  the  rec- 
tor played  most  condescendingly  with  his  lasses,  and  dealt 
out  the  lordliest  indulgence  to  them. 

"If  your  Newgate  is  for  the  men  who  lie  in  wait  for  the 
poor,  and  spread  the  net  for  the  simple  ones — "  Yolande  be- 
gan, swelling  with  the  generous  scorn  which  combated  cra- 
ven fear;  but  Milly  interrupted  her  by  bouncing  up  and  put- 
ting her  plump  hand  on  her  mouth. 

"  How  can  you  go  into  such  a  huff  and  be  so  saucy  to  Mr. 
George,  Ma'mselle?  Do  make  allowance  for  her,  sir;  it 
must  be  her  French  breeding  which  renders  her  so  shy  and 
savage,  as  she  laughs  and  declares  she  is,  when  the  black 
dog  is  not  on  her  back,"  explained  Milly  in  something  like 
artlessness.  "  Now,  little  Dupuy,  come  down  from  your  high 
horse,  and  don't  look  at  me  as  if  you  would  take  a  bite  of  me  : 
it  ain't  no  use.  Why,  I've  known  all  along,"  she  continued, 
triumphantly,  "  Mr.  George  had  it  in  his  head  to  give  us  a 
bit  of  pleasure,  in  the  only  way  he  could  with  all  our  folks 
so  straight-laced  and  tyrannical  over  us.  I  can  tell  you  I've 
had  my  work  to  decoy  you  abroad  to  such  a  safe  distance 
:is  to  enable  this  gentleman  to  put  his  purpose  into  executioiic 
Many  a  time  I've  had  to  say  '  Plague  take  that  granny  of 


THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY.  249 

yours,  who  was  always  in  the  way.' "  In  tins  fashion  giddy, 
deluded,  incorrigible  Milly  gloried  in  what  should  have  been 
her  shame. 

Yolande  lost  every  particle  of  her  fitful  bloom,  and  paled 
to  a  stonier  grey  than  ever,  with  her  mobile  mouth  set  hard, 
though  perhaps  she  cried  as  she  had  not  yet  cried  in  thefost 
falling  shadows.  Some  natures  breakdown  more. surely  at 
the  falsehood  and  ingratitude  of  a  friend  than  at  any  personal 
danger  and  suffering. 

Yolande  would  not  continue  a  struggle  which  was  useless 
from  the  moment  she  was  lifted  into  the  carriage.  Happily 
for  the  Honorable  George  and  his  gentility,  it  was  not  nec- 
essary to  put  the  mufflers  which  had  been  provided  for  her 
hands  and  mouth  into  requisition.  She  sat  in  the  gathering 
darkness,  giving  no  farther  token,  though  her  consciousness 
of  her  position  was  morbidly  keen.  The  approaching  night, 
the  increasing  distauce  from  Sedge  Pond,  the  treachery  and 
absence  of  trustworthiness  in  Milly  Rolle,  the  insolent  auda- 
city and  defiance  of  her  will  by  Mr.  George,  came  over  her 
strongly.  She  dared  not  trust  herself  to  think,  lest  she  should 
break  down,  for  no  Huguenot  girl  could  bear  the  thought  of 
being  overcome  by  tribulation.  She  could  not  allow  her- 
self to  conjure  up  the  amazement  and  consternation  which 
her  absence  would  excite  in  the  isolated  emigre  household 
at  the  Shottery  Cottage,  or  what  she  believed  would  be 
Grand'mere's  piteous  patience,  and  the  sore  check  the  old 
woman  would  put  upon  herself,  that  she  in  her  age  might 
sustain  and  minister  to  the  middle-aged  man  and  woman, 
Avho  remained  her  children  still  as  much  as  young  Yolande. 
She  knitted  her  soft  brows,  pressed  her  tender  lips  together, 
and  clenched  her  weak  hands,  to  keep  herself  from  wasting 
her  small  strength  in  a  fruitless  outcry  against  the  violence 
which  had  been  done  to  her.  After  all,  it  was  something  to 
be  a  Huguenot  even  in  a  strait  quite  removed  from  the  old 
Huguenot  trials.  Just  as  Madame  was  reminding  Grarid'- 
mere,  in  the  desolated  domesticity  of  the  Shottery  Cottage, 
that  it  was  not  for  nothing  the  Huguenot  women  had  en- 
dured unspeakable  indignities  and  burning  wrongs  in  the 
a"i<jues-mortes  and  the  convents,  Yolande  was  reasoning  with 
herself  whether  she  was  so  degenerate  a  daughter  of  her 
people  that  she  could  not  take  up  her  share  of  the  universal 
trouble,  however  panic-stricken  and  mortifying  her  peculiar 

L  2 


250  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

experience.  "Was  the  God  of  the  noble  old  Huguenot  wom- 
en too  lofty  and  far-off  to  deign  to  heed  a  poor  girl's  distress, 
in  the  imminent  risk  of  her  good  name  ? 

In  the  mean  time  Mr.  George  was  beguiling  the  time  by 
taking  snuff  out  of  the  Duchesse-de-Longueville  box  which 
poor,  unsuspicious  Grand'mere  had  admired.  As  he  did  so 
he  chattered  to  Milly  Rolle,  and  introduced  into  the  chatter 
all  sorts  of  languid,  frivolous  baits  and  lures  to  reconcile  Yo- 
lande  to  her  fate.  He  promised  the  girls  the  sight  of  a  pro- 
vincial  Ranelagh,  under  the  vague  protection  of  other  ladies 
of  his  acquaintance — a  hint  sufficient  to  make  Milly  jump 
with  joy  and  cry  breathlessly,  "  Oh,  sir,  will  there  be  Chinese 
lanterns,  such  as  one  hears  of  in  town  ?  Will  there  be 
boats  to  sail  and  sing  in  without  the  fear  of  being  drowned  ? 
Alleys  to  run  away  and  dance  in  with  any  fine  partner  who 
offers  ?  And  real  boxes  where  one  may  sit  with  one's  party, 
drink  real  tea,  munch  real  cakes,  and  quiz  all  the  other  box- 
fuls ?     Oh,  you  ninny,  Ma'mselle,  why  ain'  you  delighted  ?" 

But  Yolande  was  only  the  more  affronted  and  indignant. 
"To  think  that  I  would  be  pleased  with  such  things — the 
colored  glass,  the  cakes,  the  monde  as  wicked  as  this  cruel 
man,  with  his  smooth,  smiling  face,  which  is  hard  like  a  rock, 
while  my  father  and  my  mother  are  in  despair,  and  Grand'- 
mere crying  out  sorrowfully  for  me  !  My  heart,  what  do 
they  take  me  for  ?  Dream  they  that  I  shall  be  kept  still  as 
a  sabot  by  the  talk  of  Hoods,  bull-dogs  at  farms,  or  herds  of 
cattle  going  to  market?  I  am  a  poltronne,  but  not  com- 
me  pa.  On  the  contrary,  I  shall  watch  like  a  mouse  till  I 
can  gnaw  and  creep  through  all  these  obstacles,  and  not  for  a 
quarter  of  an  hour,  but  a  quarter  of  a  year,  though  I  wade, 
swim  even,  and  hazard  being  worried  and  gored  by  horned 
cattle  the  whole  way  home.  But,  behold,  it  is  all  over  with 
him  and  his  family,  all  over  !  But  when  was  it  ever  begun, 
save  in  i\\<z  mode  Franpaise,  which  he  found  detestable,  thou 
silly,  slighted,  dragged-through-the-mire  Yolande  ?  Still  I 
was  worthy  of  him  in  a  sense  before,  now  I  am  unworthy 
of  him  or  any  man.  The  dear  Grand'mere  may  essay 
to  console  as  she  will,  she  can  not  undo  this  day's  work  ;  and 
she  has  told  me  already  that  the  French  girls  are  never  seen  or 
heard  of  out  of  their  families  and  those  of  their  intimes  till 
they  are  married  and  under  the  protection  of  their  husbands, 
because  a  word,  a  breath  of  scandal,  a  letter  or  a  rendezvous, 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  251 

sullies  a  young  girl  beyond  an  honest  man's  count.  Tout 
beau!  what  would  they  think  of  afuite  like  this." 

Mr.  George's  chariot,  with  its  four  long-tailed  castle-breds, 
was  struggling  along  a  frightful  by-road,  where  no  four 
horses  except  those  to  the  manner  born  could  have  kept  to 
their  traces.  They  made  so  little  progress,  however,  that 
their  master  took  the  precaution  of  sending  on  all  his  spare 
fellows  before  to  bespeak  refreshments  and  accommodation 
for  the  party  at  the  first  inn  they  should  come  to.  "  I  can 
not  trust  these  rascals,"  represented  Mr.  George,  "  and  to 
sup  on  a  raw  rasher  and  sleep  in  a  damp  bed  would  be  the 
death  of  me  for  certain  ;  and  though  you,  little  Dupuy,  with 
your  flinty  heart,  would  not  mind  that,  I  have  an  objection 
to  having  it  recorded, '  Here  lies  George  Rolle,  dead  of  vile 
cookery  and  a  shocking  catarrh  caught  in  the  service  of 
women  who  were  ungrateful  to  the  unlucky  dog.'  " 

"Dear!  dear!  Mr.  George !"  deprecated  Milly,  in  a  gen- 
uine flutter;  "what  tempts  you  to  speak  so  of  Newgate, 
and  tombstones,  and  such-like  dismals,  in  connection  with 
yourself?     It  is  as  bad  an  omen  as  having  one's  chamber- 


pr< 

treating  her  concern  for  him  cavalierly,  as  he  crossed  his 
booted  leg  and  pointed  his  toe,  "since  Harry  the  rogue  can 
dress  a  kidney,  and  make  a  bed  when  he  chooses,  with  any 
Moll  cook  or  Nancy  still-maid  of  the  lot." 

Milly  ventured  to  pursue  the  agreeable  associations  thus 
suggested,  by  inquiring,  with  interest,  if  Master  Harry  could 
do  any  thing  to  friars'-chicken  or  cherry-pie,  which  she 
must  own  were  hertid-bits.  Mr.  George  vouched  with  un- 
blushing confidence  for  Harry's  compounding  both  on  the 
spur  of  the  moment,  and  Milly  rewarded  her  grand,  all-pow- 
erful cousin  for  his  ready  attention  to  her  wishes,  by  brid- 
ling still  more,  and  disclosing  that  the  nighl  air  was  giving 
her  such  a  prodigious  appetite  that  she  seemed  to  palate 
the  dainties  already. 

"  And  what  will  you  have,  my  dear  Mademoiselle  ?  Now 
don't  look  so  contemptuous,  since  you  have  not  supped.  I 
bee;  and  implore  that  yon  will  not  "turn  yourshoulder  to  me 
and  stare  out  of  the  opposite  window  there.  It  i<  not  becom- 
ing, it  is  not  genteel,  it  is  not  pretty,  little  Dupuy."     So  Mr. 


252  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

George  persecuted  the  object  of  his  vagrant  affections,  and 
pressed  his  flagrant  suit.  "I  have  an  immense  deal  more 
experience  than  you,  as  to  how  young  women  should  behave. 
I  have  made  it  my  study;  and  granted  that  a  coquette  who 
piques  a  gentleman  into  opening  his  eyes  is  something,  yet 
the  style  will  only  work  if  the  creature  is  of  the  first  water; 
and  a  man  soon  gets  sick  of  contradiction  and  defiance  when 
a  reasonable  amount  of  complacency  would  attach  him  for 
life — for  a  year  and  a  day  at  least.  Think  of  it  in  time. 
Take  an  example  by  Cousin  Milly,  and  deign  to  indicate  to 
your  slave  what  you  might  prefer  by  way  of  gross  material 
food  and  drink  during  the  indefinite  period  between  the  hour 
of  noonday,  when  you  last  took  dinner,  and  that  in  which  it 
will  be  possible  for  him  to  live  without  the  adorable  com- 
pany of  his  two  witches." 

"  That  must  be  main  soon,"  put  in  Milly,  smartly,  notwith- 
standing the  dubious  condemnation  of  coquetry,  "  else  my 
papa  and  mamma  will  never  forgive  me  this  frolic,  though 
it  is  so  mortal  dull  at  the  rectory  when  your  family,  sir,  is 
not  at  the  castle.  I  believe- the  old  people  think  that  Doll 
and  me  should  be  content  to  play  all  our  lives  with  daisies, 
kittens,  and  Black  Jasper,  as  we  did  when  we  were  chil- 
dren." 

"I  have  not  the  roc's  egg"  admitted  Mr. George, candid- 
ly, maintaining  his  cross  fire  ;  "  but  if  little  Dupuy  will  only 
oblige  me  by  stating  her  wishes,  however  nice  they  are, 
however  hard  she  is  to  please,  if  they  are  attainable  by  man 
doubly,  madly  enamored,  I  engage  they  shall  be  fulfilled." 

"Ma'mselle,  do  you  hear  Cousin  Kollc?"  remonstrated 
the  provoked  Milly.  "  Do  what  Cousin  Rolle  bids  you,  or 
I'll  not  be  fit  to  hold  my  hands  from  boxing  your  cars." 

The  aggrieved,  insulted  Yolande,  thus  turned  upon  by 
one  who  had  been  her  friend,  had  nothing  to  say  to  her, 
but  to  him — "  Monsieur  I  want  only  bread  and  water  to 
keep  me  from  dying  of  hunger  and  thirst.  And  I  do  not 
want  it  too  much,  for  if  I  die,  I  die — that  is  not  much  to  a 
Huguenot ;  we  are  used  to  it,  the  dying  under  persecution — 
indeed,  we  have  called  it,  glorifying  God  when  He  asked  it 
of  us  in  the  times  past;  and  I  suppose  He  asks  it  besides 
of  all  his  poor  ones  with  bent  heads  and  broken  hearts.  If 
you  do  not  kill  me,  I  return  to  Grand'mere  over  deep  seas 
or  roads  strewn  with  flints." 


THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY.  253 

"  Farce,  my  child,"  Mr.  George  negatived,  from  such  a 
tremendous  height  of  conceit  and  patronage,  that  to  have 
brought  him  to  a  sense  of  his  base,  unmanly  trifling  would 
have  been  as  much  as  to  perform  a  miracle.  "  Such  doings, 
monstrous  uncomfortable  ones,  went  out  with  King  Arthur, 
if  they  ever  were  in.  Did  you  ever  hear  of  demoiselle  or 
grisette  turning  up  nowadays,  on  the  back  of  an  abduction, 
in  the  guise  of  a  beggar-maid  ?  I  should  think  not.  If  you 
ever  show  your  divine  face  again  in  such  a  wretched  hole 
as  Sedge  Pond,  which  was  altogether  unfit  for  you,  I  lay  a 
bet  of  my  last  hundred,  and  Mistress  Milly  here  will  be  um- 
pire, that  it  will  be  seen  riding  in  a  cOach  no  worse  than 
this  one,  though  it  is  just  possible  my  venerable  old  friend 
may  forget  how  well  De  Sevigne  was  broken  in  to  behave 
on  such  occasions,  and  refuseflike  a  mean,  old,  cross-patch, 
to  receive  you." 

"  Is  it  that  God  receives  as  well  as  avenges  ?"  said  Yo- 
laude,  sticking  to  her  point,  with  her  great  steadfast  grey 
eyes,  so  different  from  Milly's  twinkling  hazel  ones.  "  I  do 
not  ask  Him  to  avenge  me.  I  leave  his  vengeance  to  him- 
self, according  to  his  word.  But  as  God  is  perfect,  Grand'- 
mere  will  try  to  be  perfect.  I  laugh  at  disgracing  Grand'- 
mere.  Can  you  stain  the  lily,  Monsieur,  or  soil  the  moon, 
though  the  hands  with  which  you  do  your  devoir  are  as 
ink,  and  the  clouds  as  pitch  ?  For  me,  you  can  not  carry 
me  out  of  God's  sight  and  reach ;  with  all  your  boldness, 
you  do  not  mean  that.  If  I  am  to  glorify  Him  by  suffering, 
as  my  people  have  done,  He  will  permit  me  to  die,  or  teach 
me  to  live.  Ah !  with  Him  darkness  is  light  and  death  is 
life,  and  so  I  rest  your  serviteitr,  Monsieur." 

"Mr.  George,"  remonstrated  Milly,  vehemently,  "  I  won- 
der you  have  so  much  to  say  with  Ma'mselle ;  I  wonder  you 
go  on  discording  with  her.  I  am  advised  she  is  an  out- 
and-out  Methody  of  the  French  stamp.  Did  you  ever  hear 
such  a  naughty  girl,  to  say  all  these  good  Bible  words,  as 
if  this  was  Sunday,  and  she  were  composing  one  of  my 
papa's  imposing  homilies?  To  apply  them  to  herself  too. 
in  such  a  trumpery  affair  as  being  run  away  with  by  an 
overgallant  gentleman,  which  I'll  go  bound  she  would 
have  given  her  ears  to  have  been  long  since.  She  daunts 
me.  I  have  to  poke  my  fingers  into  my  ears,  for  I  can't 
abide   to   hear  a  slut  of  a  woman  preaching,  like  Satan 


254  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

reproving  sin,  no  more  than  my  mother  could  listen  to  a  ser- 
mon, once  delivered,  pity  on  us !  by  Madam  Gage  of  the 
Mall.  Have  done  with  your  rhapsodizing  and  your  quot- 
ing of  the  Bible,  Ma'msellc;  you  forget  that  I'm  a  cler- 
gyman's daughter.  Be  more  modest,  for,  in  spite  of  all  our 
regard  and  confabs,  I  must  tell  you  plainly  that  I'm  black 
ashamed  of  you." 

But  Milly  got  something  else  to  daunt  her  very  soon. 
The  October  night  had  drawn  its  white  moist  veil,  scented 
with  the  subtle,  melancholy  perfume  of  decaying  vegeta- 
tion, over  the  earth,  close  enough  to  mask  faces  of  misery, 
and  every  act  and  actor  which  called  on  the  light  of  day  to 
expose  them.  What  of  the  wind  and  water-mills  which 
had  at  first  shown  distinct  in  the  dense  red  gold  of  sunset 
was  blotted  out  along  with  the  millers'  houses,  for  which 
Yolande  searched  vigilantly,  as  well  as  for  the  square-neck- 
ed, sloping-shouldered  red  churches  and  hamlets  which 
burst  out  impetuously  here  and  there  like  the  attempts  at 
riot  and  rebellion  with  which  the  political  world  was 
primed.  But  these  were  always  at  too  great  a  distance  for 
a  scream  to  reach.  Miller,  or  bell-ringer,  or  busy  mother- 
ly woman,  carrying  water  from  the  draw-well  for  her  good- 
man's  supper,  or,  taking  advantage  of  the  last  light  of  day, 
sitting  on  the  door-step  working  with  the  bobbins  or  the 
straw  which  won  bread  for  her  bairns,  were  alike  beyond 
Yolande's  reach.  It  was  very  likely  neither  gaffer  nor 
gammer  would  have  been  so  disinterested,  or  so  much  at  lei- 
sure, as  to  have  paid  respect  of  the  kind  desired,  to  a  faint, 
stifled  scream  issuing  from  a  muddy  chariot.  One  or  other 
would  rather  have  gaped,  told  himself,  or  herself  in  abject 
admiration,  "  that  be  a  charyot  and  lower,"  and  then  taken 
refuge  in  the  cautious,  self-satisfied  reflection,  "  folks  mun 
mind  their  own  business,  and  let  their  neebors  light  theirs 
out  for  theirsens.  But  mappen  the  gentry  be  none  the  better 
agreed,  or  the  freer  from  trouble,  than  the  bondagers.  In 
troth,  that  squeel  sounded  as  if  yon  were  some  poor  body 
going  a  road  with  main  ill-will." 

As  it.  was,  Mr.  George  had  no  call  to  use  the  muffler,  and 
it  served  him  for  a  trifle  to  toy  with,  as  a  mad  doctor  trifles 
with  a  strait  waistcoat  so  long  as  the  patient,  at  whom  he 
is  glancing  out  of  the  corner  of  his  eye,  is  not  refractory 
and  furious.     And  the  notable  thing,  in  either  case,  Mould 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  255 

be  that  Yolande,  or  the  patient,  would  remain  perfectly- 
quiet  and  demure  as  cats,  while  it  would  be  Mr.  George, 
or  the  mad  doctor,  who  would  be  guilty  of  unrebuked 
and  unsuspected  folly,  of  all  sorts  of  antics  with  the  muffler 
and  the  waistcoat — hanging  it  over  their  heads  or  round 
their  shoulders,  or  dressing  their  lingers  in  it  like  a  com- 
pany of  puppets. 

The  carriage  lights,  with  which  Mr.  George  ought  to 
have  been  provided,  had  been  neglected.  The  hunter's 
moon  threw  only  such  a  'struggling,  fitful  light  between 
banks  of  clouds  as  caused  single  farm-houses  and  detached 
cottages,  seen  by  its  dim,  chill  beams,  to  look  awfully  lonely 
and  miserably  poverty-stricken.  The  deep  ruts  in  the 
heavy  loam  of  the  by-road,  now  no  longer  visible  to  the 
coachman,  made  the  horses  flounder  in  their  toil,  and  the 
chariot  to  rock  ominously,  like  a  ship  on  a  stormy  sea, 
every  moment  driven  more  and  more  among  the  breakers. 

It  was  in  vain  that  Mr.  George  stuck  his  head  out  of  the 
window  and  delivered  angry  commands  and  counter-com- 
mands, accompanied  by  mouthfuls  of  blasphemous  oaths, 
and  a  feint  of  drawing  his  walking-sword  and  "pinking," 
or  murdering  the  driver,  as  the  only  natural  and  justifiable 
mode  of  dealing  with  a  difficulty  and  the  servant  who 
could  not  cope  with  it. 

The  levity  of  Mistress  Milly's  chatter  was  jolted  out  of 
her.  She  became  white  about  the  rosy  gills,  and  began  to. 
add  to  the  din  by  screaming  as  piercingly  as  she  had 
screamed  when  the  hostile  mob  threatened  my  lady's  car- 
riage in  the  market-place  of  Reedham,  and  by  Hinging  her- 
self frantically  from  side  to  side,  and  clinging  desperately 
now  to  Yolande's  shoulder,  now  to  Mr.  George's. 

"  Monsieur,"  said  Yolande,  her  voice  clear  and  audible  in 
its  liquid  foreign  articulation,  and  sounding  like  the  sud- 
den peal  of  a  little  bell,  "  is  there  the  semblance  of  an  over- 
throw ?" 

"  You  have  hit  the  mark  exactly,  Mademoiselle.  And 
how  does  such  a  heroine  as  you  are  like  danger  when  it  is 
near  ?"  said  Mr.  George,  who  had  all  the  coolness  to  mako 
the  investigation  with  a  sneer. 

"  I  don't  like  it,"  answered  Yolande,  quite  truthfully  ; 
"  nevertheless,  I  believe  Grand'ni&re  prays  for  us,  and  I  am 
sure  her  prayers  will  be  heard  before  your  curses.     But, 


256  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

Monsieur,  the  poor  trembling,  tired  beasts  are  overdriven, 
and  thus  they  stumble  at  every  step." 

"  Hang  me,  but  raving  devotee  of  a  Mademoiselle  though 
you  be,  you  are  right,"  acknowledged  Mr.  George,  not  a 
coward  on  his  own  account,  and  not  so  great  a  fool  as  to  re- 
fuse to  admit  and  correct  a  mistake  when  it  was  pointed 
out  to  him — a  mistake,  too,  which  his  knowledge  of  horse- 
flesh, about  equal  to  that  of  vertu,  would  have  prevented 
had  it  not  been  for  what  he  inherited  of  his  mother's  insane- 
ly impatient  and  imperious  temper,  which  had  been  excited 
by  opposition,  and  ruffled  beforehand  by  the  encounter  he 
had  undergone  with  what  struck  him  as  the  superhuman 
courage  and  constancy  of  the  French  girl. 

But  before  Mr.  George's  fume  could  abate  sufficiently  to 
allow  him  to  arrest  the  reckless  spurring  and  whipping  of 
the  horses,  with  a  last  lurch,  a  wilder  scream  from  Milly,  a 
more  frightful  imprecation  from  Mr.  George,  and  a  half 
breathed  murmur  from  Yolande,  the  chariot  toppled  over 
Avith  a  stunning  impetus  and  a  shiver  of  glass.  There  was 
a  snort  of  horses'  breath,  a  rattle  of  horses'  feet,  and  the 
chariot  lay  right  across  the  road,  hanging  into  the  ditch 
which  bordered  it.  Happily  for  the  occupants  of  the  car- 
riage the  tormented,  terrified  horses  broke  the  traces  with 
one  bound,  struggled  to  their  feet,  those  of  them  that  could 
still  muster  strength  for  flight,  and  scampered  off,  clattering 
.and  plunging  along  the  rough  road,  while  those  that  were 
dead-beat  stood  and  shook  at  a  few  yards  distance. 

Mr.  George  was  no  coward,  as  has  been  said,  neither  was 
an  overturn  so  rare  and  improbable  an  incident  in  his  an- 
nals that  he  had  no  precedent  in  his  experience,  no  resources 
for  the  occasion.  But  though  he  was  not  left  insensible 
by  the  accident,  he  was  so  far  bruised  and  disabled,  and  so 
hemmed  in  by  the  cracked  and  split  framework  of  the  char- 
iot, that  he  was  unable  to  extricate  himself,  far  less  to  aid 
others.  The  situation  once  proved,  he  accepted  it  with 
sang-froid,  made  an  effort  to  reach  his  snuff-box,  and  not  be- 
ing able  to  attain  that  iHtimatum^  leaned  his  elbows  in  their 
splendid  militia  uniform  on  the  panel  which  imprisoned  him, 
and  contemplated  the  wreck  around  with  as  much  ease  as 
he  could  command. 

Mistress  Milly  Rolle  was  not  killed,  or  nearly  killed,  though 
she  was  crying  with  all  her  might  that  she  was.     It  was 


THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  257 

self-evident  that  no  one  could  be  half  killed  and  make  the 
row  Mistress  Milly  was  making,  not  only  in  wagging  her 
tongue,  but  in  beating  with  her  feet  on  the  boards,  and 
pushing  with  her  hands  in  all  directions,  though  she  made 
no  attempt  to  rise. 

Mr.  George  was  not  so  sure  of  Mademoiselle.  As  far  as  he 
could  distinguish,  while  he  peered  through  the  darkness, 
she  was  stretched  without  motion  for  a  minute  or  two,  and 
his  callous  heart  gave  a  throb  of  remorse  ;  then  she  stirred, 
slowly  at  first,  more  rapidly  afterwai'd,  until  soon  she  got 
up  as  if  nothing  had  happened, -and  ran  to  Milly. 

''Art  thou  much  hurt,  Milly?  Where  is  the  pain? 
Raise  thyself  up,  lean  on  me.  Softly,  softly,  my  friend,  else 
the  nerves  will  become  masters,  and  they  are  horrible  ty- 
rants, the  nerves." 

All  the  honest  indignation  against  the  unutterable  re- 
proach of  Milly  was  gone  from  Yolande's  voice,  and  instead 
there  was  the  pity  of  a  strong  angel  for  a  weak  girl. 

But  Milly  Rolle  declined  Yolande's  overtures  rudely,  and 
Avith  a  querulous  and  disconsolate  Avail. 

"  Go  away,  Ma'mselle;  you  are  at  the  bottom  of  this  mis- 
chief. Mr.  George  would  not  have  moved  in  it,  had  it  not 
been  to  get  the  better  of  your  prudery  and  nonsense,  and  my 
death  will  be  at  your  door.  Oh  !  indeed,  do  you  think  I 
would  let  a  chit  like  you  put  a  finger  on  me — and  every  bone 
of  me  broken  already — to  finish  my  business  entirely.  Alake  ! 
my  papa,  why  are  you  not  here,  to  call  people  to  account 
for  the  scrape  they  have  got  me  into  ?  My  mamma,  Avhy  do 
you  not  come  to  take  care  of  your  poor  girl?" 

"Mistress  Milly,"  Mr.  George  startled  the  girls  by  say- 
ing, as  quietly  as  if  they  Avere  all  seated  at  the  castle  supper- 
table.  When  they  looked  round,  and  tried  to  discover  him, 
a  struggling  moonbeam  gave  them  a  glimpse  of  his  smooth 
sallow  face,  rendered  grotesquely  horrible  by  a  huge  splash 
of  mud  on  it,  and  by  his  scratch  Avig  having  been  displaced 
in  the  shock,  so  that  his  head  looked  like  a  lunatie1s  in  his 
primitive  bareness,  as  it  nodded  to  them  with  imperturba- 
ble good-breeding  over  the  broken  panel — "Mistress  Milly, 
I  beg  you  to  have  some  mercy  on  your  own  lungs,  cousin, 
if  not  on  our  ears,  and  those  of  the  owls  and  the  bats;  the 
tympanums  of  the  latter  may  recover,  but  I  implore  you  to 
consider  that  it  is  the  former  which  will  be  the  greatest  sul- 


258  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

ferers  in  this  contretemps,  if  you  persist  in  exerting  them  to 
so  tremendous  an  extent.  My  good  creature,  be  reasonable; 
we  are  all  in  the  same  mess ;  and  though  little  Dupuy 
seems  provided  with  wings  for  this  and  every  other  catas-< 
trophe,  I,  for  my  part,  have  come  off  but  poorly.  Allow  me 
to  mention  that  I  have  had  the  small  misfortune  to  lose  an 
eye.  I  am  convinced  that  one  of  my  eyes  has  been  knocked 
out  in  rough  contact  with  this  detestable  pale,"  asserted  the 
Honorable  George,  affording  a  wonderful  example  of  phi- 
losophy in  his  own  person,  as  he  put  up  his  hand  with  sim- 
ple ruefulness,  and  touched  a  cold  wet  mass  in  the  socket 
of  his  eye. 

Yolande  ran  to  him  at  that  word.  "  Can  I  do  any  thing 
for  you,  Monsieur  ?  Can  I  bind  up  the  wound  ?  We  have 
had  the  art  of  stanching  wounds  since  Bernarde  Romilly 
stanched  the  wounds  of  the  great  Conde.  Allow  me' to  ex- 
tricate you  from  the  barricade." 

Monsieur  stared  fixedly  at  that  proposal.  The  girl,  who 
had  held  him  at  arm's  length,  and  contrived  to  discomfit  him 
when  he  had  her  at  his  mercy,  now,  when  there  had  been 
what  the  Methodists  would  have  called  a  signal  interposi- 
tion of  Providence  in  her  behalf,  neither  triumphed  in  his 
downfall,  nor  left  him  to  his  fate,  nor  seized  the  opportunity 
to  run  away  to  the  Grand'mere  she  thought  so  much  of. 
She  bent  over  him  with  a  charity  which  knew  no  bounds, 
suggesting  the  new  idea  to  a  man  of  his  calibre  that  one  of 
the  creatures  of  women,  whom  he  made  at  the  best  his  poor 
playthings  and  at  the  worst  his  abominable  tools,  might  have 
a  devotedness  which  soared  above  his  stoicism  in  the  season 
of  calamity,  and  was  able  to  afford  him  support  and  succor 
instead  of  requiring  it  from  him.  "I  thank  you  humbly, 
Madam  ;  I  am  afraid  it  is  beyond  your  power  to  liberate 
me,"  said  Mr.  George,  with  more  sincere  respect  than  he  had 
yet  addressed  Yolande,  or  possibly  any  woman,  in  the  whole 
course  of  his  existence,  not  excepting  my  lady  his  mother. 

"Some  hob-nailed  lout  of  a  plough-boy,  or  carter,  I  make 
no  question,  will  come  up  soon  ;  or  my  fellows,  tired  of  wait- 
ing for  us,  will  have  the  grace  to  return  and  scour  the  road 
for  our  bones  any  time  between  this  and  Christmas." 
However,  he  submitted  with  something  like  meekness  to 
Yolande's  attempt  to  examine  his  eye,  to  see  whether  his 
hasty  conclusion  was  correct.     And  he  did  not  fly  out  in  a 


THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  25  9 

rage  and  decline  to  entertain  her  correction  of  his  state- 
ment in  the  anonncement  that  the  eye  was  there,  apple  and 
all,  and  that  he  must  have  mistaken  for  a  much  more  serious 
and  irretrievable  misfortune  the  sudden  darkening  and 
smarting  produced  by  the  bath  of  mud  in  his  face.  When 
it  was  carefully  and  tenderly  wiped  away — and  Mademoi- 
selle was  wiping  it  with  her  own  foulard — the  blessing  of 
full  vision  would  be  restored  unimpaired. 

"I  crave  your  pardon,  Mademoiselle,"  Mr.  George  exclaim- 
ed quickly,  and  still  more  gravely  and  earnestly,  "for  having 
spread  so  exaggerated  a  report  of  my  own  misadventure,  and 
making  myself  out  in  as  bad  a  pickle  as  Miss  Milly  will 
have  herself  to  be  in.  I  trust  you  don't  credit  me  an  out- 
and-out  dastard  for  my  silly  error.  Stay,"  continued  Mr. 
George,  recovering  himself  from  his  momentary  vexation, 
"I  think  it  must  be  my  rascal  of  a  coachman,  who  took  the 
liberty  of  putting  us  down  in  this  unceremonious  style,who  is 
beginning  to  groan  so  dismally  on  t'other  side  of  me  that, 
zounds  !  I  suspect  it  must  have  been  he  who  has  been  killed 
all  along,  and  not  my  Cousin  Milly  and  me." 

It  was  terribly  like  it.  The  coachman  who  had  brought 
Mr.  George's  expedition  to  grief  in  the  first  stage,  had  come 
to  great  grief  himself,  and  was  the  person  who  was  making 
the  least  sign.  Yolande  found  him  sobbing  his  breath  away 
from  a  mortal  stroke  in  the  chest.  And  when  she  had  prop- 
ped him  up  and  procured  water  in  his  cocked  hat  from  the 
ditch  to  bathe  his  drooping  head  and  moisten  his  dry  lips,  he 
spoke  to  her  with  that  awful,  unerring  instinct  of  quieUiess 
which  waits  on  the  height  of  bodily  and  mental  anguish: 

"  I  be  done  for  in  the  last  of  our  bad  jobs.  My  breast- 
bone be  stove  in.  The  beastses  as  I  drove  so  long,  and  as 
I  cut,  faix !  overdeep  the  night,  have  turned  on  me  and 
done  it.  Yes,  there's  the  wife  as  oue;ht  to  be  thought 
on,  spoke  about,  purwided  for, 'cause  there's  no  good  flop- 
ping and  thinking  of  kingdom-come  at  this  time  of  the 
night.  Pearson's  kin^dom-comc's  none  for  the  likes  of  me, 
and  there's  ne'er  a  Methody  to  be  found  by  the  side  of  a 
road,  to  flop  with  one,  even  if  their  kingdom  would  have  a 
gift  at  the  last  gasp  of  a  battered  rip  of  a  castle  coachman 
— not  my  lady's  head  coachman,  only  a  under,  and  'pointed 
to  serve  Lord  Kolle  and  Mr.  George's  pleasure." 

Yolande  hurried  back  to  where  Mr.  George  was,  by  com- 


2G0  TIIE   UUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

parison,  lightly  crippled.  "  Milord,"  she  told  him,  tripping 
in  her  eager  speech,  "  your  domestic  is,  without  doubt,  a  dy- 
ing man.  I  have  seen  death,  though  I  am  only  a  girl,  and  I 
know  the  meagre  face.  Milord,  Monsieur,  though  you  can 
not  rise,  and  I  can  not  pull  you  out,  if  you  turn  your  head 
and  lean  on  your  elbow,  you  will  see  the  domestic,  and  can 
say  what  you  may  to  enlighten  and  sustain  him.  He  has  a 
poor  wife,  and  she  is  at  the  heart  of  him,  he  looks  for  the 
first  time  to  the  other  world,  to  which  he  is  going  with  long 
strides.  Have  I  need  to  say  there  is  not  a  moment  to  be 
lost  ?" 

Mr.  George  shrugged  his  shoulders  and  waved  his  hand 
decidedly,  declining  the  commission.  "Assure  the  poor 
wretch  that  I  commiserate  him,  if  that  will  do  him  any 
good  ;  and  tell  him  that  I  shall  count  myself  bound  to  look  aft- 
er his  wife,  although  probably  he  knows  as  well  as  I  do  where 
I  am  to  get  a  penny  to  put  into  her  purse,  and  how  much 
good  being  looked  after  by  a  man  like  me  will  do  her.  Let 
that  be.  For  the  rest  I  keep  no  account  with  the  Church, 
it  is  out  of  my  line.  I  am  fain  to  add,  Mademoiselle,  that 
though  I  do  not  fear  death  in  this  sorry  carcase  of  mine,  I 
have  no  taste  for  looking  it  in  the  face  when  other  people, 
with  whom  I  am  by  no  means  connected,  are  concerned. 
I  never  can  make  out  what  sends  some  of  us  poking  at 
corpses  lying  in  state,  or  prowling  round  coffins  moldering 
in  vaults.  Bah  !  the  spectacle  is  not  only  an  impolite  re- 
minder, but  a  disagreeable  reality,  and  breeds  disagreeable 
dreams.  My  gospel  is  to  turn  my  back,  when  consistent 
with  honor,  on  whatever  is  disagreeable,  doleful,  and  nasty. 
'Pon  my  word,  I  reckon  it  a  bounden  duty.  Go  and  preach 
to  the  miserable  sinner  so  long  as  his  breath  and  yours  last, 
my  Mademoiselle,  but  be  pleased  to  hold  me  excused  from 
the  service." 

Yolande  was  foiled,  and  in  her  perplexity  cast  a  thought 
on  Milly,  since  Milly's  very  ungovernable  paroxysm  of  lam- 
entation and  scolding  had  become  hushed  before  that  one 
strange  word  of  death.  Milly  had  gathered  herself  up  and 
was  crouching,  sick  and  shuddering,  in  the  shelter  of  the 
bank.  "  Milly,  I  had  forgotten,  you  are  the  daughter  of  a 
good  pastor  and  the  sister  of  Captain  Philip,  who  drew  his 
last  sigh  on  a  battle-field.  Will  you  say  a  prayer  of  your 
Church,  which  he  knows  and  can  follow,  to  the  dying  man, 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  261 

while  I  take  his  head  on  my  lap,  that  he  may  die  more  easi- 
ly. There  is  no  black  thrush  in  his  mouth  and  throat,  there 
can  be  no  infection  here  save  that  of  mortality." 

"How  could  you  be  so  hardened  as  to  propose  such  a 
shockiug  thing,  Ma'mselle  ?"  cried  Milly  Rolle,  rousing  her- 
self to  a  vehement  refusal,  "when  Mr.  George  himself 
can  not  look  on  the  sorry  sight  of  his  servant  dying  a 
violent  death?  Me,  who  have  never  set  eyes  on  a  dead 
man !  And  it  is  so  bad  to  begin  now  in  a  dark  night,  by 
a  roadside,  that  if  I  do  not  wink  with  all  my  might,  and 
duck  my  head  to  keep  out  all  sight  and  sound,  I  shall 
go  stark,  staring  mad  before  morning;  I  know  I  shall. 
I  am  not  in  orders  that  I  should  dare  to  read  church  pray- 
ers; none  but  a  Methody  would  make  so  bold.  As  to 
your  twitting  me  with  poor  Brother  Philip's  death  in  a 
wood  or  a  marsh  instead  of  in  his  bed,  I  can  only  say  it 
is  monstrous  unkind  of  you,  and  I  can  not  tell  what  you 
mean  by  it." 

"Imean  no  harm,"  Yolande  maintained  sadly,  "and 
the  sight  is  not  so  bad  as  you  and  Monsieur  think — oh  ! 
not  near  so  bad,  since  our  Lord  died  where  every  body 
could  see.  Ah!  if  Grand'mcre  were  here!  But  what 
would  I?  God  is  always  here,  and  what  do  I  and  the 
dying  want  more  ?" 

When  Yolande  had  the  castle  coachman's  head  in  her 
lap,  far  gone  as  he  was  he  recognized  her,  and  remonstrated 
hoarsely,  "You  are  good  to  me,  miss,  you  whom  I  went  for 
to  trap !  Who  knows  but  it  was  the  wust  of  my  wust 
deeds  ?" 

"  Don't  speak  of  it,"  negatived  Yolande,  with  Grand'mere 
and  Monsieur  Landre's  way  of  forgiving  their  enemies — 
so  fine  a  way  that  it  sounded  as  if  the  forgiveness  were 
full,  and  as  if  it  changed  the  name  and  the  character  which 
ordinary  men  and  women  give  it,  as  they  either  brandish  or 
dole  it  out,  and  made  it  large-hearted  forbearance,  tender 
brotherly  kindness,  sweet  true  love. 

"There  was  a  sinner  who  was  in  condemnation,  as  we  all 
are,  my  coachman,  who  cried  out  that  he  had  received  the 
just  reward  of  his  deeds,  and  yet  he  asked  a  King  who  was 
waiting  by  him  to  remember  him  graciously  when  lie  cqme 
to  His  kingdom."  Yolande  told  the  story  of  the  Dying  thief 
to  ears  which  grew  greedy  as  they  grew  dull;   and   the 


262  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

hearer  was  still  capable  of  receiving  the  news  and  ap- 
plying it  to  a  parallel  case,  for  he  objected  doubtfully. 

"  But  so  be,  miss,  there  is  an  odds  in  this  here  pass,  for  it 
be  I  alone  who  am  fair  punished.  Harry  and  Will,  little 
Hal,  and  Martin  Reeves,  most  of  all  Master  George,  as  is 
not  guiltless,  nay,  but  whose  bidding  we  did,  and  for  whose 
pleasure  we  did  it — they  all  go  scot-free — scot-free,  and  I 
be  done  for  at  one  dang,"  he  repeated,  wistfully. 

"That  is  true,"  assented  Yolande  simply;  "but  must 
you  be  punished,  and  punished  alone,  when  God  is  just,  and 
his  Son,  our  brother,  says,  '  Repent,  my  coachman,  for  the 
kingdom  of  heaven  is  at  hand?'  What  if  you  be  taken 
away  to  keep  you  from  heavier  sin,  and  your  fellows  and 
your  master  spai'ed  to  give  them  greater  time  for  repent- 
ance? How  know  you  their  needs  or  their  degree  of  guilt, 
or  that  you  may  not  be  the  chosen,  the  favored,  to  be  sum- 
moned first  by  a  summons  which,  if  He  will,  can  not  be  too 
short  ?" 

"  Anan  !  You're  beyond  me,  clear  or  muddled.  But  you 
are  good,  and  mappen  they're  gooder  aloft  yonder.  There 
may  be  mercy  in  the  dang,  I  dunnot  know,  I  howpe  so,  and 
I  know  I  never  so  much  as  howped  the  like  before ;  for, 
Lord,  I  repent — I  repent,  help  my  repentance,  and  sain  my 
soul." 

The  victim  of  Mr.  George's  orders  and  his  own  obedience 
to  them,  spoke  no  more. 


CHAPTER  XXIV. 

TnE   RIDER,  AND   THE   RIDE   HOME   AS  IT   SHOULD  NOT 

HAVE    BEEN. 

Yolande  reverently  covered  the  dead  man's  face  with 
her  handkerchief.  In  life  the  poor  rough-living  coachman 
would  not  have  excited  the  slightest  interest  in  Milly  and  Mr. 
George ;  but  Yolande  was  struck  with  the  fact  that  now  he 
was  armed  with  qualities  which  made  him  an  object  of  con- 
siderable-speculation to  the  one,  and  of  lively  apprehension 
to  the  other.  In  the  mean  time  the  plight  of  the  party  was 
getting  more  grievous.  The  moon  was  setting,  and  there 
would  yet  be  a  long  interval  before  the  October  dawn. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  263 

Mr.  George,  closely  wedged  in,  was  stiffening  in  his  bruises. 
Milly's  shivers  were  running  through  her  convulsively, 
and  with  aguish  chattering  of  the  teeth.  But  there  was 
no  word  yet  of  Mr.  George's  Harry  heading  an  exploring 
expedition  from  the  "  Barley  Mow"  or  the  "  Waggon  Rest," 
or  of  any  laborers  trudging  homeward  and  lending  them  a 
lift,  or  conveying  speedy  intelligence  of  their  distress  to  a 
quarter  whence  help  could  come,  before  they  were  all  dead 
from  exposure  and  want.  Yolande  would  have  wandered 
alone  in  search  of  aid,  and  Mr.  George  could  have  trusted 
her,  but  Milly  threatened  to  go  into  fits  if  Yolande  left  her 
for  a  moment  "with  that — you  know  what  I  mean,  though 
you  have  no  sensibility,  Ma'mselle,  not  a  particle — lying  so 
near  me.     Oh  !  I  declare  it  is  moving,  Ma'mselle !" 

"  Would  that  it  were,"  answered  Yolande,  sadly,  "  though 
it  may  be  a  selfish  wish,  for  this  place  is  another  than  par- 
adise. Yet  what  can  be  said  to  the  wife  who  may  be  listen- 
ing for  his  step  and  voice  ere  this  hour  to-morrow  ?  How, 
Milly  !  what  harm  can  the  clay  do  when  there  was  not  even 
the  black  thrush  in  the  poor  still  throat  before  the  breath 
quitted  it  ?" 

"  Oh  !  don't  speak  of  it,  you  strange,  stony  creature,  or 
else  you'll  frighten  me  next  yourself.  But  I  don't  give  you 
leave  to  stir  from  the  spot — that's  poz — unless  you  take  me 
with  you,  and  as  I  can't  move,  or  even  stand,  you  must 
carry  me  on  your  back." 

Then  Yolande,  listening  intently  to  a  faint  noise  in  the  dis- 
tance, was  certain  that  a  flight  of  birds  like  lapwings  had 
suddenly  risen  several  fields  off,  and  had  uttered  one  or  two 
cries  as  an  announcement  that  they  had  been  disturbed  by 
an  unexpected  intrusion  on  their  privacy  and  repose.  Mon- 
sieur Landre  had  taught  her  to  interpret  the  sounds  she 
heard  thus  far,  and  to  know  that  it  was  not  the  neighbor- 
hood of  Mr.  George  and  his  companions  which  had  roused 
and  offended  the  birds'  sense  of  propriety.  Something 
must  be  stirring  nearer  them.  Listening  intently,  Yolande 
believed  that  she  detected  the  flap  of  bridle  reins,  the  ring 
of  stirrups,  and  the  heavy  motion  of  a  well-trained  horse 
feeling  its  way  over  broken  ground. 

Disregarding  Milly's  frantic  opposition,  Yolande  set  off  at 
once  toward  the  point  whence  the  sounds  came.  Mr. 
George,  on  seeing  her  movement,  indulged  in  some  char- 


264  TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

acteristic  commentary  loud  enough  to  be  beard  by  the  run- 
ning Yolande.  "  'Fore  George,  you  are  a  complete  Ama- 
zon, little  Dupuy.  You  were  a  French  Puritan  and  mystic 
ten  minutes  agone,  now  you  are  preparing  to  clear  a  hedge 
like  the  Fair  Huntress,  instead  of  la  Belle  Jardin  icre.  How 
many  characters  have  you,  if  it  is  fair  to  ask  ?  As  many 
as  the  Montespan,  or  the  Maintenon,  Scarron's  widow  ?" 
But  Yolande,  heeding  not,  scrambled  up  the  bank  to  the 
left  of  them,  tore  her  way  through  a  hedge,  toiled  across 
the  corner  of  a  pasture  field,  and  crying  out  at  the  pitch  of 
her  voice,  "  Hold  !  hold  !  to  the  right !  help  !  help !"  made 
an  opening  through  another  hedge,  and  all  but  fell  exhausted, 
in  the  utmost  disorder,  at  the  feet  of  a  man  guiding  a  horse 
toward  her. 

"  "What  has  happened,  Mademoiselle  Dupuy  ?"  demand- 
ed young  Caleb  Gage,  catching  hold  of  her,  too  agitated 
himself  to  mind  his  words.  "  You  need  not  go  any  farther. 
Now  what  an  adventure  for  a  girl  who  has  just  come  out 
of  a  bad  sickness !  What  cau  have  befallen  your  friends 
that  they  suffer  you  to  run  like  this  over  the  fields,  and  at 
night  too  ?" 

Without  being  aware  of  it,  Caleb  Gage  spoke  like  a  man 
aggrieved,  and  it  did  not  require  his.  impatient,  indignant 
manner  to  cause  Yolande's  tongue  to  cleave  to  the  roof  of 
her  mouth.  The  shock  of  the  unknown  helper  turning  out 
to  be  the  young  squire  of  the  Mall,  and  the  concern  as  to 
what  he  would  think  of  her,  and  how  he  would  look  on 
her  trouble,  were  quite  sufficient  to  reduce  Yolande  to  the 
lowest  ebb  of  distress  and  humiliation,  without  the  amaze- 
ment and  vexation  in  his  voice.  Again,  the  consciousness 
that  he  or  any  man  could  thus  move  her  without  holding,  or 
seeking  to  hold,  any  claim  upon  her,  filled  her  with  shame 
and  dismay. 

"  That  it  should  bo  he !  He  will  think  me  bold,  lost  to 
all  modesty  and  dignity  !  What  will  he  not  think  of  me  ? 
And  if  he  thinks  the  worst — shall  not  I,  who  am  a  sheep  at 
the  best,  be  punished  for  caring  what  he  thinks  ?"  All  this 
passed  through  Yolande's  mind  in  her  pain  and  mortification, 
before  she  gasped,  "  There  has  been  an  accident,  Monsieur 
— :i  carriage  overturned  en  route,  and  a  man  killed." 

The  brief  communication  served  for  the  moment.  It  was 
of  a  grave  enough  character  to  warrant  the  manner  of  Yo- 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  265 

lande's  appearance.  The  uncertainity  who  the  man  was  that 
had  been  killed,  combined  with  a  horror  that  the  victim 
might  be  Monsieur  Dupuy  himself,  made  Caleb  feel  an  addi- 
tional delicacy  in  questioning  Yolaude.  So  he  turned  with 
her,  and  rather  then  cross-examine  her,  he  preferred  to 
explain  how  he  had  been  riding  home  to  the  Mall  a  good 
three  quarters  of  an  hour  ago,  by  a  road  a  good  three 
quarters  of  a  mile  distant,  when  he  had  been  startled  in  the 
quietness  of  the  scene  and  the  season  by  what  he  was  cer- 
tain were  cries  of  distress  uttered  in  a  female  voice.  In  his 
turn  he  had  attempted  to  trace  the  sound,  and  it  was  with 
great  difficulty  he  had  found  a  footing  for  his  horse  and 
reached  the  spot  were  she  had  accosted  him  ;  for  the  cries 
had  ceased  for  some  time  to  guide  his  ear. 

Lapsing  into  silence,  in  which  throbbing  hearts  could  be 
the  better  felt,  Caleb  Gage  and  Yolande  traversed  the  short 
distance  back  to  where  Monsieur  and  Milly  lay.  But  Yo- 
lande found  the  whole  aspect  of  things  changed.  The  valet 
Harry  and  the  other  servants  had  at  last  turned  out  from 
the  inn,  provided  with  lights  and  ropes.  Under  the  smoky 
gleam  and  the  flare  of  lanterns  and  torch-wood,  half  a 
dozen  busy  pairs  of  hands  were  raising  the  broken  chariot. 
They  were  doing  all  they  could  to  release  the  Honorable 
George,  and  had  secured  such  of  the  horses  as  were  not 
miles  on  their  way  to  the  castle  stables. 

Yolande  had  another  pang  of  regret.  Caleb  Gage's  pres- 
ence was  no  longer  wanted,  and  without  her  intervention 
he  might  have  passed  them,  and  she  might  thus  have  escap- 
ed being  seen  by  him  in  her  miserably  equivocal  position. 

As  for  Caleb,  he  stood  confounded  at  the  sight  of  George 
Rolle,  in  his  cynical,  dissolute  elegance  forming  the  central 
figure  in  the  group.  He  paid  no  heed  to  the  salutation  of 
Milly  Rolle  whose  spirits  were  beginning  to  revive,  and 
who  cried  out  with  a  giddy  giggle  and  a  childish  insensi- 
bility to  the  world's  opinion  of  her  situation — 

"Good-day  to  you,  Mr.  Caleb  Gage.  Arc  yon  going  to 
join  us  in  our  little  junketing,  if  the  old  squire  anil  the 
preachers  of  your  body  will  allow  you?  I  vow  you  are 
the  properest,  most  obedient  fellow  I  know.  Bui  only  for 
once,  by  way  of  frolic,  Master  Gage.  And  little  Dupuy 
with  us  too,  with  regard  to  whom  we  all  know  that  your 
father  and  her  granny  had  intentions.     Why,  it  happens 

M 


266  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

quite  pat  that  you  two  should  foregather  to-night.  Who 
knows  what  the  lucky  coincidence  may  lead  to  ?  La !  it  is 
too  pat  when  one  conies  to  think  who  it  was  that  flew  off 
in  the  thick  of  our  hobble,  and  lit  upon  you  and  your  horse 
at  the  nick  of  time.  For  my  part,  I  consider  Ma'mselle  is 
hugely  sly." 

Caleb  Gage,  at  the  risk  of  being  asked  why  lie  "cut" 
a  gentleman,  and  being  accused  of  insulting  him,  did  not  so 
much  as  acknowledge  Mr.  George's  approved  raising  of  his 
hat  to  greet  the  new-comer.  He  did  not  take  a  step  until 
it  was  forced  upon  his  notice  that,  with  none  but  servants 
who  had  been  employing  their  spare  time  in  drinking  dog's- 
nose  at  the  inn,  and  who  were  farther  flustered  by  the  rat- 
ing which  had  beeft  administered  to  them  on  their  first  ar- 
rival, he  was  more  likely  to  suffer  than  to  benefit  by  the 
clumsy  efforts  made  on  his  behalf.  For  the  workers  were 
only  jamming  his  limbs  still  tighter,  and  aggravating  be- 
yond bearing  their  master's  dislocated  collar-bone  and 
sprained  wrist. 

Caleb  Gage  went  forward  then  and  exerted  his  skill  and 
strength  in  the  business.  He  said  no  word,  however,  until 
Mr.  George,  on  being  extricated,  observed,  without  a  shade 
of  change  in  his  nonchalance,  "I  suppose  I  need  not  thank 
you,  sir?  you  will  have  none  of  my  thanks;  but,  at  least, 
allow  me  to  explain  that  your  lending  me  your  valuable  as- 
sistance has  saved  you,  as  a  clergyman's  cloth  saves  him, 
from  any  obligation  on  my  part  to  resent  your  appearance 
and  what  seems  your  uncalled-for  disapprobation." 

"  I  deny  seeking  to  save  myself  from  any  result  of  this 
encounter,  Mr.  Rolle,"  answered  Caleb,  "  though  it  may  be 
convenient  for  you  to  leap  to  that  conclusion,  and  equally 
so  in  the  present  case  to  hold  that  a  clergyman's  cloth  shel- 
ters him  from  your  defense  of  your  deeds.  I  make  bold  to 
remind  you  that  neither  that,  nor  kinsmanship,  has  been  a 
shelter  from  the  deed  itself.  I  can  not  tell  how  your  cousin, 
Mr.  Philip  Rolle,  may  act  under  such  monstrous  provocation. 
As  for  myself,  although  I  little  guessed  the  spectacle  I  was 
doing  my  poor  endeavors  to  figure  in,  instead  of  standing 
aloof,  as  you  clearly  expect,  and  seeing  a  great  wrong  con- 
summated, I  have  to  say  to  those  misguided  young  ladies 
who  are  traveling  under  what  you,  sir,  are  well  aware  is 
worse  than  no  protection,  that  if  they  will  suffer  me  to  con- 


TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  267 

duct  them  back  to  their  families,  nothing  on  earth  will  hin- 
der me  from  being  at  their  service.  And  if  you,  Mr.  George 
Rolle,  or  your  servants,  offer  resistance  to  their  return, 
which  I  beg  and  implore  them,  by  all  they  have  ever  held 
dear  and  sacred,  to  set  about,  you  will  find  that  the  small 
aid  I  have  been  able  to  render  you  need  by  no  means  stand 
in  the  way ;  and  that  only  what  I  am  sorry  to  see  are  your 
bodily  injuries  must  interpose  between  us." 

Times  and  manners  have  changed  since  Huguenot  fami- 
lies sought  shelter  in  England,  and  the  English  gave  it  them, 
and  a  royal  bounty  besides,  not  without  adding  their  quota 
of  persecution  to  the  gift ;  so  that  a  note  of  explanation  may 
be  here  called  for.  Mr.  George's  speech  implied  that  an  act 
of  charity  or  humanity  on  Caleb  Gage's  part  had  redeemed 
him  from  the  penalty  due  to  his  mere  presence  there,  acci- 
dental and  passive  as  it  had  been  till  now.  Mr.  "George 
would  neither  take  the  initiative  in  aceusation,  and  "  post" 
the  Methodist  squire's  son  as  a  liar  and  scoundrel  on  the 
church-yard  gate  at  Sedge  Pond,  or  in  the  market-place  at 
Reedham ;  nor  would  he  go  out  to  waylay  and  attack  him 
with  a  horsewhip,  because  men  educated  like  young  Gage 
had  a  conscientious  objection  to  the  commonest  use  of  pock- 
et-pistols. Caleb  understood  the  speech  and  the  sarcasm 
perfectly,  and  it  sufficiently  galled  the  strong,  independent 
young  man,  Avho  was  accustomed  to  consider  his  strength 
and  comparative  impartiality  as  constituting  him  a  natural 
safeguard  and  protection,  not  to  his  father  and  his  father's 
friends  only,  but  to  all  those  whose  backs  were  at  the  wall. 
He  had  taken  a  frank,  honest  satisfaction  in  such  a  partisan- 
ship, single-hearted  and  modest,  Avhich  was  something  dif- 
ferent, yet  in  many  respects  the  same  as  the  old  fantastic 
generosity  of  the  knight  who  believed  in  and  meant  to  keep 
his  vow  of  chivalry.  To  be  taunted  with  his  own  exemp- 
tion in  the  evil  and  bitter  experience  to  which  he  had  unex- 
pectedly become  privy,  was  more  than  the  young  man's  spirit 
could  stand.  Already  he  had  witnessed  his  standard  of  ex- 
cellence shamefully  torn  down,  his  religions  loyalty  and  pu- 
rity brought  into  totally  unlooked-for  contact  with  what  he 
was  not  able  to  regard  as  other  than  the  grievous  wanton- 
ness and  wickedness  of  the  world.  Caleb  did  not  require 
the  Honorable  George's  swagger  to  cause  his  heart  to  burn 
within  him  in  sorrow  and  anger.     He  had  only  to  look  in 


268  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

despair  at  the  shrinking,  averted,  delicate  face  of  Yolande, 
and  listen  to  the  folly  and  coarseness  of  Milly  Rolle's  chal- 
lenge, to  drive  him  almost  mad.  So  he  had  spoken  in 
a  towering  passion,  and  succeeded  in  bringing  some  of  the 
bad  blood  to  George  Rolle's  cheek.  The  people  clearing 
the  road,  and  collecting  the  remains  of  the  chariot,  brought 
their  occupation  to  an  abrupt  stop.  Divided  between  the 
pugnacity  produced  by  liquor,  and  the  morbid  appetite  of 
vice,  they  stood  shouldering  each  other,  and  waiting  for  an 
intimation  from  Mr.  George  to  set  upon  the  single  man,  who, 
in  entire  command  of  his  youthful  prime,  vigor,  and  agility, 
was  not  yet  altogether  overmatched.  Milly  Rolle  tossed 
her  head,  flounced,  and  called  out — 

"  Did  you  ever  hearken  to  such  a  conceited,  strait-laced 
pedagogue  of  a  bumpkin  ?  Punish  him,  Ma'mselle,  by  nev- 
er letting  on  that  you  hear  the  insolent  wretch." 

But  Yolande  spoke  with  quivering  lips  and  a  dry  voice. 

"  I  have  the  honor  to  accept  your  escort,  Monsieur.  It 
was  not  with  my  wish  that  I  came  here."  She  could  say 
no  more.  Courageously  as  Yolande  could  assert  herself  to 
a  scoffing,  unscrupulous  sinner  like  George  Rolle,  there  was 
some  people  to  whom,  if  circumstances  were  against  her, 
she  could  not  defend  herself,  and  Caleb  Gage  was  one  of 
them. 

"  Oh  !  little  Dupuy,  you  heartless  Madam,  is  that  your 
French  fashion  of  iidelity,  to  leave  us  in  the  lurch,  and  to 
think  of  deserting  Mr.  George  when  he  has  fallen  into  a 
doleful  plight?"  said  Milly  Rolle,  not  scrupling  to  refn'oach 
Yolande,  who  remained  quite  dumb. 

Mr.  George  hesitated.  Though  he  piqued  himself  on  be- 
ing a  philosopher,  it  Avas  gall  and  wormwood  to  him,  as  it 
would  have  been  to  his  mother  had  she  been  in  his  place,  to 
submit  to  be  foiled  in  the  most  discreditable  of  his  schemes. 
On  the  other  hand,  he  was  a  man  of  the  world,  and  in  many 
respects  a  shrewd  one.  He  knew  that  ho  had  failed  in  his 
little  adventure  already.  He  was  not  in  a  condition  to  pros- 
ecute it  farther,  however  much  amusement  it  might  have  af- 
forded him,  and  however  delightfully  precarious  and  uncer- 
l.iin  its  termination.  He  should  be  glad  of  his  fellow  Har- 
ry's arm,  and  it  would  be  the  worse  for  the  rascal  afterward 
if  he  could  not  time  his  steps  to  walk  evenly  so  as  to  enable 
his  master  to  drag  himself  to  the  promised  inn,  where  he 


THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  269 

might  have  his  hurts  seen  to,  and  procure  the  refreshment 
and  rest  of  which  he  was  so  much  in  want.  So  far  as  his 
own  comfort  was  concerned,  he  would  be  glad  if  Mistress 
Milly  Rolle  would  take  it  into  her  feather  "head  to  follow 
Mademoiselle's  example,  and  give  him  the  slip  on  the  first 
opportunity.  He  was  getting  sick  of  the  exploit,  and  even 
without  this  odious  denouement  it  was  proving  too  much 
for  him.  It  might  be  very  well  by  way  of  change  to  rave 
and  rant  a  little  about 

"A  pensive  nun,  devout  and  pure, 
Sober,  steadfast,  and  demure," 

and  to  feel  a  mild  curiosity,  such  as  his  mother  had  felt  be- 
fore him,  to  try  whether  he  could  not  shake  her  out  of  her 
propriety  and  rout  her  heroics.  But  the  experiment  had 
not  turned  out  to  his  satisfaction.  The  Huguenot  had 
contrived  to  wound  his  vanity,  and,  particularly  after  this 
overturn,  to  deal  hits  which  touched  what  softness  was  in 
him,  and  which  he  did  not  at  all  relish.  By  this  plaguy  in- 
tervention of  young  Hopeful  from  the  Methodist  nest  at  the 
Mall,  the  business  would  be  blown  over  the  neighborhood, 
and  if  Mr.  George  persevered  in  carrying  it  out  by  main 
force,  the  scrape  might  be  serious. 

Writhing,  wincing,  and  making  faces  from  pain  of  body 
as  well  as  the  sharp  taste  of  humble  pie,  Mr.  George  could 
not,  therefore,  be  so  dignified  and  lazily  debonnaire  and  au- 
dacious as  he  was  wont  to  be.  It  was  with  something  like 
an  ugly  grin  and  an  impotent  gnash  of  his  teeth  that  he 
said  to  Caleb,  "  My  dear  sir,  I  am  not  astonished  that  the 
role  of  a  gentleman  is  not  altogether  known  to  you.  I  am 
deeply  grieved  that  I  am  not  at  present  in  circumstances  to 
teach  it  you.  Perhaps  at  some  future  time  I  may  have  that 
happiness.  In  the  mean  time  I  must  inform  you  that  I  pro- 
fess to  be  the  ardent  admirer  and  humble  servant  of  the  la- 
dies in  general,  and  of  those  two  ladies  in  particular  ;  there- 
fore you  must  see  that  I  can  not  contradict  Mademoiselle 
Dupuy's  wishes,  openly  expressed  (let  me  observe  aside, 
my  dear  young  lady,  that  there  was  no  occasion  for  so  de- 
cided and  sweeping  a  statement),  however  they  may  take 
me  by  surprise,  and  inflict  on  me  a  cruel  disappointment. 
So  far  from  so  ungallant  and  ungentlemanlike  a  course,  my 
good  young  Mr.  Jephunneh,  if  my  dear  cousin  from  the 


270  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

rectory  like  to  leave  me  to  my  fate  also,  and  trudge  away 
with  you  and  Mademoiselle  on  your  Rosinante,  in  the  style 
of  the  tinker,  the  tinker's  wife,  and  his  apprentice,  she  may 
do  so,  unless  you  will  please  to  wait  till  I  send  for  another 
of  my  carriages  ?  Pray  allow  me — I  do  not  think  all  the 
set  are  done  for ;  but  she  has  my  free  permission  and  my 
best  wishes,  as  well  as  the  other  goddess." 

"  Oh  dear,  no,  Mr.  George,"  cried  Milly,  obstinately. 
"  I  would  not  forsake  you  for  the  universe  ;  I  have  not  the 
heart  to  do  it ;  I  leave  that  to  a  fickle  friend  like  Ma'mselle  ; 
let  her  go,  faugh  !  she's  no  loss." 

Mr.  George  was  so  thoroughly,  basely  selfish,  that  he  put 
no  weight  on  Milly's  going  or  staying,  except  in  reference 
to  his  own  wayward  inclinations ;  and  it  was  not  on  his 
cards  to  take  guilt  to  himself  by  advising  her  to  accompany 
Yolande,  and  by  forcing  Milly  to  leave  him  in  spite  of  her- 
self. He  preferred  doing  Milly  and  her  father,  the  rector  of 
Sedge  Pond,  his  cousin  and  his  mother's  friend,  the  deadly 
injury  of  taking  the  girl  at  her  word,  and  keeping  her  with 
him. 

Caleb  Gage  was  not  sufficiently  acquainted  with  the  truth, 
and  was  too  bent  on  rescuing  Yolande  from  degradation 
and  ruin,  to  stand  by  poor  infatuated  Milly,  as  he  might 
otherwise  have  done.  Yolande  too  was  sinking  under  the 
burden  of  shame  which  she  had  not  deserved.  She  was 
overwhelmed  with  strange  reproach,  wounded  tenderness, 
and  outraged  virtue ;  but  yet  she  held  out  her  hands  pit- 
eously  to  Milly,  as  though  it  would  be  craven  in  her  to  quit 
her  companion  and  give  her  up  to  her  own  willful,  crazy 
choice. 

"  Am  I  to  go  back  alone,  Milly  ?  All  is  not  lost  yet, 
my  friend.  The  past  can  still  be  undone.  Have  pity  on 
yourself — on  your  parents." 

Milly  only  answered  with  senseless  recrimination  and 
abuse,  and  Mr.  George  begged  Mademoiselle  not  to  pro- 
tract her  adieux,  as  he  took  Harry's  arm  and  called  out 
"  bon  voyage" 

Here  came  out  the  miserable  meanness  of  the  man,  which 
could  exist,  iii  company  with  some  faint  sparks  of  valor  and 
some  dying  embers  of  liberality — making  a  partial  display 
of  the  rags  and  tatters  of  nobility.  Mr.  George  could  suf- 
fer the  French  girl,  whom  he  had  insulted  and  abused  as 


TIIE  huguenot:  family.  271 

far  as  he  dared,  and  who,  as  far  as  she  could,  had  repaid 
him  good  for  evil,  to  go  without  a  word  of  explanation, 
without  a  sentence  in  vindication  of  the  innocence  which 
he  and  Milly  Rolle  had  conspired  to  cloud  and  asperse. 

But  Mr.  George  did  one  good  thing.  His  bearing,  with 
its  mannerly  refinement  and  unshaken  self-conceit,  restrain- 
ed his  people  from  any  expression  of  rude  license  or  out- 
break of  hostility.  So  when  Caleb  Gage  had  taken  Yo- 
lande's  cold  hand  and  lifted  her  on  his  horse,  arranging  a 
pillion  for  her,  and  mounting  before  her  as  men  and  women 
were  then  accustomed  to  ride  to  church  and  market,  he 
successfully  extricated  himself  from  the  rubbish  and  the  tur- 
moil, passed  the  still  and  silent  figure  with  the  face  still 
hidden  by  the  handkerchief,  and  rode  away  into  the  night. 

Yolande  had  not  the  slightest  doubt  of  her  deliverer  ;  she 
did  not  even  distrust  his  wearied  horse — because  it  was 
Caleb  Gage's.  She  was  going  back  to  Grand'mere  swiftly, 
surely,  and  far  sooner  than  she  had  any  title  to  expect ;  but 
for  all  that,  Yolande  thought  she  would  have  died  where 
she  sat. 

Caleb  was  her  deliverer,  but  not  her  champion.  He  was 
her  friend,  because  he  was  "  a  kindly  man  among  his  kind," 
like  his  father  before  him,  but  he  was  without  any  faith  in 
her  perfect  righteousness  in  this  matter.  Her  lover  he  had 
never  been,  her  husband  he  had  refused  to  be;  but  it  was 
hard  that  she  should  suffer  this  lowest  depth  of  humiliation. 
Yolande  did  not  suppose  she  could  have  suffered  it  but  for 
what  had  gone  before  it — the  si<j;ht  she  had  seen,  the  words 
she  had  spoken  that  night.  When  she  thought  of  these 
things  she  felt  it  would  be  the  same  a  hundred  years  hence, 
whether  she  was  honored  or  defamed  now.  What  was 
mortal  man's  praise  and  blame  to  the  spirit  which  the  com- 
mon tragedy  of  death  had  placed  in  so  new  and  solemn  a 
light,  that  even  Mr.  George  and  Milly  Rolle  had  been  af- 
fected by  it?  Why  should  she  make  so  much  ado  about 
the  chances  of  this  life,  which  was  so  brief  at  the  longest, 
and  at  all  times  so  pathetically  uncertain,  that  she  should 
be  unable  to  survive  this  shame  ?  Still,  she  could  not  ap- 
peal to  Caleb  Gage,  remonstrate  with  him,  tell  her  story, 
and  plead  not  guilty.  To  him  her  tongue  was  tied — would 
be  tied,  though  she  were  to  ride,  not  for  a  night,  but  for  a 
life,  behind  him. 


272  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Caleb  was  desperately  calm  and  gentle  -with  Yolande, 
and  all  the  more  that  his  heart  was  very  sore,  with  a  sore- 
ness for  which  he  saw  no  healing.  His  first  thought  had 
been  to  take  her  straight  to  Shottery  Cottage  and  to 
Grand'rnere,  some  eight  miles  distant.  But  his  horse  fail- 
ed more  and  more,  as  Yolande's  voice,  answering  his  in- 
quiries in  monosyllables,  sounded  more  sick  at  heart  and 
weary,  and  the  touch  of  her  hand  felt  chiller.  He  feared 
that  she  would  not  be  able  to  keep  up,  and  would  faint  ere 
they  reached  her  home.  Then  he  considered  the  reception 
she  might  meet  with,  and  that  having  so  lamentably  de- 
parted from  her  duty,  her  people  might  be  harsh  to  her. 
The  austere  mother,  the  worldly  father,  and  possibly  even 
the  pietist  of  a  youthful-minded,  foolish  old  woman  might 
be  bitter  in  proportion  to  the  love  which  they  had  borne  to 
the  sole  child  of  the  house,  who  would  be  its  pride  no  more, 
and  for  whom  it  could  do  little  else  than  take  her  in  and 
hide  her.  He  was  sorry  for  these  Huguenots,  more  sorry 
than  he  could  have  fancied  he  would  have  been  for  those  an 
alliance  with  whom  he  had  rejected,  and  whose  society  he 
had  repudiated.  Notwithstanding,  it  was  not  for  him  to 
subject  a  girl,  however  justly  she  had  offended,  to  any  but 
merciful  treatment.  There  might  be  more  hope  of  mercy 
— at  least  the  danger  of  the  shock,  with  the  unrestrained 
lamentations  and  reproaches  to  which  he  must  be  a  listener, 
would  be  averted  if  he  left  room  for  preparation. 

To  save  Yolande  from  breaking  down  under  his  charge, 
and  to  defend  her  from  the  wrath  of  those  who  had  a  right 
to  chide,  but  who  might  be  tempted  to  abuse  the  right, 
Caleb  Gage  decided  on  taking  Yolande  first  to  the  IMall, 
which  was  nearer  than  Sedge  Pond,  and  which  often  served 
as  a  hospice  for  travelers.  His  father's  presence  Avould  re- 
move all  objection  to  her  lodging  there  for  the  rest  of  the 
night.  Somo  one  of  his  second  cousins  might  be  persuaded 
into  showing  womanly  attention  and  sympathy  to  this  ex- 
traordinary claimant  of" the  Mall's  charity,  so  that  she  should 
not  feel  forlorn  and  forsaken  in  her  repentance.  For  that 
she  had  repented  was  proved  by  her  consenting  to  turn 
with  him  at  the  moment  of  his  proposal.  But  oh!  he 
thought,  these  light  Gallic  natures,  so  shallow-hearted,  and 
quick  to  rue  because  quick  to  err  !  He  had  believed  her 
the  pattern  of  all  maidenhood,  only  too  wise  and  severe  in 


TIIE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  273 

her  devotion  to  God  and  her  Grand'mere,  and  to  the  per- 
formance of  good  works,  and  the  acquisition  of  knowledge; 
whereas,  woe  to  him !  there  was  ground  for  Milly  Kolle's 
loud  complaint  that  Ma'mselle  had  deserted  the  man  who 
had  beguiled  her  (and  for  whom  she  had  previously  desert- 
ed faith,  home,  credit)  the  instant  he  was  in  distress  and 
there  was  word  of  exposure.  In  this  light,  indeed,  she 
seemed  to  add  cunning  calculation  to  hot  passion. 

Caleb  therefore  put  before  Yolande,  in  measured,  studi- 
ously softened  tones,  the  desirability  of  their  having  re- 
course to  the  hospitality  of  the  Mall.  She  neither  offered 
resistance  nor  demurred,  but  submitted  at  once.  Indeed, 
she  was  the  most  docile  of  charges,  like  a  bird  which  is 
quiet  and  still  because  its  wing  is  broken,  or  a  little  shot 
has  pierced  its  breast,  and  blood-red  drops  are  noiselessly 
eddying  out  over  its  speckled  feathers.  She  had  not  even 
strength  or  wit  enough  left  to  descry  that  if  her  heart  was 
breaking,  her  plight  had  the  power  to  break  the  spirit  of 
the  man  beside  her;  although  it  was  her  unbearable  misery 
to  think  that  she  had  no  power  over  'him,  except  to  excite 
his  humanity  into  combat  with  his  hardly  checked  aversion. 
Another  person  might  have  seen  that  it  was.a  bitter  expe- 
rience for  Caleb  Gage  thus  to  bring  Yolande  Dupuy  to  the 
Mall,  where  he  had  refused  to  bring  her  in  tender  distinc- 
tion— refused,  and  in  his  soul  retracted  his  refusal,  accusing 
himself  of  all  blindness  and  prejudice.  He  had  judged  Yo- 
lande as  far  above  him  as  the  stars  to  which  she  had  seem- 
ed fitly  bound  ;  and  now  that  he  had  her  in  his  keeping,  to 
carry  her  to  his  home  as  a  vain  moth  whose  wings  had  been 
singed,  a  poor  victim  of  George  Rolle's  cruel  kindness,  it 
was  enough  to  make  him  believe  that  he  was  not  only  him- 
self guilty  of  woeful  misconception  and  mistake,  but  that 
life  itself  was  a  huge  blunder  and  failure.  The  pregnant 
blow  of  this  one  great  evil  was  enough  to  crush  the  high 
hope  and  splendid  trust  of  young  manhood,  so  that  they 
should  never  altogether  recover  their  terrible  fall.  To  the 
Samson  whose  wife  betrayed  him  all  women  were  from  that 
moment  so  many  Delilahs.  Caleb  Gage's  dismal  disen- 
chantment might  prove  the  turning-point  from  which  the 
young  squire  should  start  gradually  but  progressively  on  a 
new  experience,  until  what  was  sweet  in  him  should  be 
leavened  with  sourness,  and  what  was  gentle  trampled  hard 

M  2 


274  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

and  callous ;  unless  indeed  he  stood  true  to  liis  religion  in 
its  manliness  as  in  its  godliness,  and  his  religion  stood  true 
to  him.  The  falseness  of  man  or  woman  to  the  divine  ideal 
of  manhood,  and  in  it  of  womanhood,  is  no  light  wrong 
against  a  fellow-creature,  nor  is  it  to  be  lightly  treated.  It 
is  the  most  disastrous  misfortune,  short  of  individual  false- 
ness to  early  promise  and  native  light,  which  can  happen  to 
him  or  her  who  has  taken  the  original  for  heroine  or  hero. 
Indeed,  it  is  too  often  the  precursor  to  such  falseness,  thus 
working  twice  death. 


CHAPTER   XXV. 

PITY    WHICH  STINGS  AND  BITES — GRANd'mERE  GRANTING    AN 

AUDIENCE. 

Caleb  Gage,  with  Yolande,  arrived  at  the  red-and-white 
house  of  the  Mall.  He  summoned  in  the  two  women — 
his  father's  trusted  housekeeper,  Lihbie  Larkins,  and  his 
ancient  cousin  Hephzibah — to  lead  Yolande  through  the 
dining-hall,  which  was  only  a  deserted  meeting-house  and 
class-room,  now  that  the  evening  exercise  and  the  supper 
were  long  by.  Their  footsteps  echoed  along  the  stone 
passages  as  they  passed  the  stripped  pictures  conspicuous 
in  their  elevation  in  the  gallery,  out  of  which  looked 
female  faces  in  every  variety  of  head-gear,  as  if  they  had 
never  even  heard  of  such  a  thing  as  a  distressed  damsel 
like  her  who  was  now  brought  into  their  honorable  com- 
pany of  sister  shadows.  Yolande  was  conducted  to  one  of 
the  primitive  dormitories,  and  there  waited  upon,  and  fed, 
and  watched  over  with  due  consideration  and  regard. 

Caleb  could  not  suspect  either  of  the  women  of  failing 
in  the  duties  which  he  required,  or  in  the  instincts  which 
were  natural  to  them.  Libbie  was  a  stout,  matronly,  mid- 
dle-aged widow,  with  activity  and  notability  marked  upon 
her  as  the  efflorescence  of  her  methodistical  Christianity,  not- 
withstanding that  the  early  Methodists  were  inclined  to  hold 
creature-comforts  cheap.  But  certainly  nobody  underval- 
ued or  ran  down  her  own  gifts  more  than  Libbie  Larkins, 
so  that  she  remained  humble  and  affable  amid  her  many  at- 
tainments. She  at  once  recognized  Yolande  as  the  grand- 
daughter of  the  gracious   old   French   madam    who    had 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  275 

praised  her  goose  pie  and  blackberry  pudding,  and  had  given 
her  a  valued  lesson  in  tossing  an  omelette:  so  highly-prized, 
indeed,  that  even  now  she  itched  to  ask  whether  the  young 
madam  carried  any  recipes  in  her  pockets  or  at  the  tip  of 
her  tongue.  But  Libbie  feared  that  she  herself  was  a  hard- 
ened sinner,  so  given  up  to  fleshly  lusts  aud  gross  appetites 
as  not  to  be  worthy  of  any  ecstatic  visions  when  she  could 
think  of  any  thing  so  common  as  dishes  and  diets  instead  of 
calls  and  convictions — subjects  which  she  felt  were  better 
suited  to  this  young  woman  of  the  world,  who  had  allowed 
herself  to  be  betrayed  into  a  scandal.  The  young  squire 
had  not  said  what  had  brought  Yolande  to  the  Mall,  but 
had  explained  that  this  was  a  young  mistress  with  whose 
family  the  old  squire  was  on  friendly  terms,  as  Libbie  very 
well  knew,  and  that  she  had  taken  fright  at  the  first  word  of 
warning,  and  had  hastened  to  accept  his  invitation  to  be 
restored  to  her  friends.  Libbie  would  know  how  to  deal 
with  a  young  lady  who  had  allowed  herself  to  go  so  far  in 
undutifulness  and  imprudence,  and  yet  not  hurt  or  humble 
her.  If  it  had  been  fair-time,  Libbie  would  have  conjec- 
tured that  Ma'mselle  had  been  to  Reedham  fair  without 
leave  ;  as  it  was,  she  saw  that  she  must  have  been  mixed 
up  with  some  other  giddy  doings. 

Mistress  Hephzibah  Gage  was  the  model  of  an  old  maid- 
en of  sixty.  She  was  slim,  where  Libbie  was  buxom ;  and 
shy,  where  Libbie,  in  spite  of  her  Methodism,  was  free- 
spoken  and  demonstrative.  She  was  a  creature  of  the  most 
limited  experience  and  the  most  one-sided  information. 
Having  led  an  utterly  secluded  youth,  and  having  dwelt 
for  a  long  time  by  herself  on  a  narrow  income  before  coming 
to  the  Mall,  she  had  a  crystal  simplicity  ami  purity  about 
her  graces,  and  a  pensive,  elevated  unworldliness  in  her 
character,  which  impressed  all  who  came  in  contact  witii 
her;  and,  above  all  others,  Libbie  Larkins,  who  did  not 
know  any  quality  or  acquirement  which  struck  her  more 
powerfully  than  blessed  Mistress  Hephzibah's  combination 
of  innocence,  ignorance,  and  enthusiasm.  She  had  been 
converted  to  Methodism  on  her  Grsl  \i>it  to  her  brother  and 
his  wife,  and  had  then  joined  the  society,  and  been  identified 
with  it  ever  since. 

Neither  Libbie  Larkins  nor  Mistress  Hephzibah  wore  of 
the  kind  of  women  to  be  exacting  with  other  woraeD,  though 


276  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

both,  in  very  different  styles,  were  intolerant  to  themselves. 
Thus  it  befell  that  though  their  faith  was  noble,  their  in- 
stincts, purified  by  their  faith,  in  general  stood  them  in 
better  stead  than  their  principles.  But  the  circumstances 
of  this  case  warped  their  instincts.  It  was  true,  they  saw 
and  admitted,  that  the  unfortunate  young  lady  was  not  an 
undaunted  offender.  Her  foreign  speech,  little  as  there  was 
of  it,  was  sweet  in  its  gratitude  ;  and  just  because  she  was 
a  gentlewoman  in  undreamed-of  straits,  she  was  careful  not 
to  put  any  body  about  or  to  engross  too  much  attention. 
Libbie  Larkins  and  Mistress  Hephzibah  would  have  been 
the  last  women  on  earth  to  visit  a  first  transgression  with 
heavy  punishment.  The  one  woman  was  too  near  spotless- 
ness  herself  to  shrink  from  contamination  with  the  spots  in 
others ;  while  the  other  was  too  large-hearted,  too  much 
given  to  serving,  not  to  have  room  and  pity  for  every  cul- 
prit. But  both  women  were  jealous  in  the  interest  of  a  man 
connected  with  them.  The  young  squire  was  their  chief 
favorite.  To  Libbie  it  was  sufficient  that  he  was  her  young 
master;  to  Mistress  Hephzibah,  that  he  was  her  young  kins- 
man. Still  they  had  not  attained  to  such  Christian  stature 
that  they  could  cast  out  fear  either  in  their  love  or  in  their 
charity,  like  the  old  squire  or  Grand'mere.  They  did  not 
like  that  the  young  squire  should  be  disturbed,  as  he  mani- 
festly was,  by  an  unfortunate  young  lady.  "  What  call  had 
she,"  Libbie  would  say  to  herself  indignantly — "  a  young 
hussy  no  better  than  she  should  be,  after  all,  and  a  lover  of 
pleasure — to  trouble  Master  Caleb  so  ?"  Mistress  Hephzi- 
bah, on  the  other  hand,  would  be  fearful  of  Yolande's  mov- 
ing young  Caleb  by  look,  word,  or  gesture. 

So  it  came  about  that  Mistress  Hephzibah,  surprised  in 
the  middle  of  the  night,  and  called  to  appear  in  nothing  less 
maidenly  than  a  high-cauled  cap  towering  above  her  fine 
but  meagre  features,  and  a  starched  neckerchief  folded 
round  her  wizened  throat,  and  Libbie,  in  her  petticoat  and 
colored  handkerchief,  knotted  round  her  head,  were  both 
somewhat  frozen  and  official  in  their  friendly  offices,  even 
when  Libbie  proposed,  "Don'tee  think  I  had  better  heat 
some  elderberry  to  warm  the  poor  heart  of  her,  Mistress 
Ilepzie?"  and  when  Mistress  Hephzibah,  thinking  that  a 
poor  young  body  might  be  too  frightened  to  lie  all  alone  in 
a  strange  room  and  a  strange  house,  more  by  token  after 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  277 

she  had  been  doing  wrong,  went  to  fetch  her  "Songs  of 
Zion,"  that  she  might  lull  her  to  sleep  even  as  a  child.  The 
two  women  were  a  little  like  the  Pope  of  Home  washing  the 
twelve  beggars'  feet,  inasmuch  as  their  beneficence  had 
something  in  it  of  supererogatory  good  works,  done  more 
for  their  own  sakes  than  for  that  of  the  recipient.  They 
pitied  her  like  Christians,  and  ministered  to  her  like  Chris- 
tians, but  they  could  not  heartily  take  to  her,  believe  in 
her,  or  hope  in  her.  The  elderberry  wine  seemed  to  scald 
Yolande's  throat,  and  the  hymns,  plaintive  or  ardent,  which 
the  cracked  voice  gave  as  a  cradle  song,  caused  bitterer 
tears  to  flow  beneath  her  closed  eyelids  than  the  girl  had 
ever  shed  before. 

Caleb,  having  given  over  his  charge,  went  to  see  his 
father,  to  tell  him  what  he  had  done,  and  to  take  counsel 
with  him  as  to  the  conveyance  of  Yolande  to  the  Shottery 
Cottage. 

The  time  had  been  when  the  old  squire's  motto  was  the 
brave  Methodist  injunction,  "  Study  yourself  to  death,  and 
then  pray  yourself  to  life  again  ;"  but  age,  with  its  dimin- 
ished powers  and  advancing  infirmities,  demanded  another 
regimen — one  of  temperate  study,  early  hours,  and  sunset 
rest.  Caleb  had,  therefore,  to  go  to  his  father's  room  and 
awake  him  from  an  old  man's  fitful  dozing  slumber,  that  he 
might  listen  to  his  story.  There,  as  in  the  great  kitchen 
where  the  squire's  chair  stood  in  the  chimney-corner,  the 
only  ornaments,  wTith  the  single  exception  of  a  woman's 
inlaid  work-table,  were  books.  There  was  even  a  shelf  of 
books  within  the  bed  over  the  pillow,  so  that  the  squire 
slept  under  the  mighty  shades  of  his  Homer  and  Virgil,  his 
Plato  and  Plutarch,  and  of  a  Hero  divine  in  an  infinitely 
higher  sense  than  all  who  had  gone  before  Him — He  who, 
rising  from  his  pillow,  could  rule  the  winds  and  the  waves, 
and  who,  rising  from  his  bed  of  death,  could  open  a  new 
world.  There  were  a  few  maps,  not  only  of  England,  but 
of  America,  with  blue  and  red  lines  traced  on  some  of  them, 
marking  out  the  circuits  on  which  many  a  time  the  squire 
had  himself  ridden,  with  his  wile  Lucy  on  a  pillion  behind 
him.  And  there  were  black-bordered,  black-lettered  cards 
of  Methodist  conferences,  more  quaint  and  suggestive  than 
ornamental  in  those  days,  and  rather  calls  to  duty  than 
pieces    of  self-indulgence,  with    their    set   times    and    sel 


278  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

subjects  appointed  for  meditation  and  prayer ;  as  -well 
as  lists,  in  the  sqaire's  own  handwriting,  of  objects  for 
his  bounty,  and  liberal  undertakings  to  be  attempted  by 
him. 

Among  these  homely  surroundings,  old  Caleb  Gage  sat 
up  in  his  tasseled  night-cap,  and  heard  the  narrative  which 
his  son,  sitting  on  the  front  of  the  bed,  delivered  to  him. 
The  good  squire  was  great  enough  to  bear  being  disturbed, 
and  was  almost  as  well  accustomed  to  receiving  dispatches 
at  all  hours  as  a  commander-in-chief  or  a  cabinet  minister. 
But  though  he  could  collect  his  Avits  rapidly,  and  with  the 
instinct  of  genius  get  at  the  truth  of  a  communication,  he 
could  make  little  of  Caleb's  incoherent  account.  His  fine 
eyes,  which  Yolande  had  asserted  saw  into  heaven,  looked 
away  farther  than  ever  as  they  clouded  over  with  wonder 
and  perplexity  ;  and  all  the  help  the  squire  gave  his  son  was 
to  go  on  arguing — 

"  Is  there  no  mistake,  lad  ?  Art  sure  you  mistook  not 
some  other  poor  Ma'mselle  for  Yolande,  the  time  being 
night,  and  you  having  small  acquaintance  with  the  rare 
child  of  old  Madame  Dupuy  ?  Did  she  give  her  name,  my 
boy  ?  How  did  she  answer  for  having  to  do  with  what  is 
so  far  removed  from  what  I  took  her  for — the  wretched 
trick  of  running  off?  You  never  asked!  Why  not?  It 
would  have  given  her  a  chance  for  an  explanation.  It 
passes  my  poor  brain,  sou  Caleb.  I  can  compass  the 
i*ector's  daughter's  deficiency — though  Philip  Rolle  is  an 
honorable  man,  and  no  mere  dead  dog  of  a  watchman, 
whatever  the  body  may  say  to  the  contrary,  and  from  my 
soul  I  pity  him  on  account  of  this  stab  from  his  kinsman  ; 
but  for  that  child,  Madame  Dupuy's  daughter,  whom  I  saw 
in  her  reverence  standing  and  waiting  in  the  background 
of  her  mother's  parlor,  only  coming  forward  when  there 
was  danger  to  be  faced  and  work  to  be  done,  at  the  dying- 
beds  in  the  hovels  of  Sedge  Pond,  as  a  right  hand  of  her 
grandmother,  I  confess,  it  beats  me  quite.  If  I  did  not 
know  you  better,  I  should  say  that  you  were  blind  with 
prejudice  and  rancor  to  even  think  of  her  as  running  off 
with  George  Rolle.  The  mystery  of  iniquity  shall  work; 
but  if  it  begins  to  work  in  such  quarters,  among  the  green 
boughs  planted  by  the  river,  it  is  more  than  I  have  witness- 
ed  yet  of  its  corruption;  and,  my  son  Caleb,  it  strikcth  me 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  279 

the  world  must  be  coming  to  an  end,  and  perhaps  the  soon- 
er the  better." 

The  old  squire's  rooted  incredulity  sustained  a  sharp 
assault  from  his  son's  repeated  excited  assertions  that  it 
was  Ma'mselle  from  the  Shottery  Cottage,  and  no  other; 
that  she  had  been  with  George  Rolle  and  Milly  Kolle  in  the 
chariot  of  the  former,  with  a  suspicious  muster  of  Rolle's 
servants ;  that  the  party,  after  sustaining  an  overturn, 
were  found,  as  dark  night  was  coming  on,  ten  miles  from 
Sedge  Pond ;  and  that  any  defense  Ma'mselle  had  vouch- 
safed to  plead  was  a  single  sorry  sentence,  which,  he  must 
say,  was  contradicted  by  all  the  presumptive  evidence,  and 
by  the  testimony  of  her  companions — that  she  was  not 
there  by  her  own  wish.  "  Why,  seeing  was  believing,  was 
it  not,  sir?"  Caleb  ended,  conclusively. 

When  at  last  Squire  Gage's  obstinate  unbelief  yielded  to 
the  force  of  facts,  he  gave  one  of  the  deepest  groans  he  had 
ever  uttered. 

"  Poor  soul !  I  could  not  have  thought  it.  How  she 
must  have  been  tried ;  ay,  and  got  the  better  of  at  last  by 
some  black  villainy !" 

Young  Caleb  could  stand  the  scene  no  longer,  and  left 
the  room  with  even  scantier  ceremony  than  Grand'mere  had 
taken  exception  to,  in  her  mission,  an  age  before. 

But  the  squire  did  not  dream  of  taking  offense — would 
have  laughed  at  the  bare  idea  of  disrespect  on  the  part  of 
his  trusty,  faithful  son.  To  doubt  his  son's  entire  regard, 
pent  up  in  one  channel  till  the  attachment  had  acquired  a 
womanly  fondness  and  playfulness,  would  have  been  to  re- 
ceive still  more  conclusive  proof  than  the  withdrawal  of 
Yolande  Dupuy  from  the  ranks  of  the  noble  and  the  true, 
that  the  solid  earth  was  slipping  from  beneath  his  feet. 

However,  the  squire  did  perceive  some  singularity  in  his 
lad's  restiveness  in  dealing  with  a  scandal  which,  as  events 
had  happened,  was  no  concern  of  his,  unless  as  a  matter  of 
common  humanity. 

"Like  his  mother  before  him,"  reflected  the  squire,  "the 
lad  had  always  magnanimity,  and  to  spare.  I  am  afraid  I 
hurt  him  by  my  scurvy  hint  otherwise.  If  my  dame  ever 
spoke  a  spiteful  word  of  any  human  being — and  being  a 
woman,  and  a  sprightly  one  by  nature,  it  stands  to  reason 
that  she  sometimes  fell  into  one  of  the  special  transgressions 


280  THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY. 

of  her  sex — yet  give  her  a  cause  of  personal  provocation, 
and  you  shut  her  mouth  close,  where  another  woman  would 
open  hers  wide.  Caleb  is  of  the  same  humor.  In  place  of 
crowing  over  the  indiscretion  and  the  disgrace  of  the  young 
French  girl  who  went  against  his  grain  at  the  first' — he- 
cause,  according  to  our  different  customs,  it  was  as  if  poor 
old  Madame  had  thrown  her  at  his  head  when  he  had  no  incli- 
nation toward  her,  and  when  the  gadding  gossips  who  knew 
no  better  twitted  him  with  the  advance,  and  caused  it  to 
rankle  deeper  than  it  should  have  done — now,  he  is  vexed 
for  the  end.  Being  a  chip  of  the  old  block — on  his  mother's 
side — it  shames  his  irked  independence  and  saucy  pride. 
And  well  it  may,  when  I  had  fancied  the  lass  was  a  youth- 
ful foreign  copy  of  his  own  mother — such  a  virtuous  young 
lady  as  John  Milton  painted  in  black  and  white,  and  John 
Dryden  writ  of  as  Mistress  Anne  Killigrew.  I  have  never 
been  tainted  with  the  Pelagian  heresy,  or  doubted  that  the 
old  Adam  in  us  was  both  deceitful  and  ill  to  eradicate,  yet 
I  profess  I  can  not  get  to  the  bottom  of  Grand'mere 
Dupuy's  virtuous  young  lady  being  made  out  no  better 
than  a  vain  court  madam." 

Yolande  meantime  lay  wide  awake  in  one  of  the  little 
guest-chambers  like  pilgrims'  cells.  Long  after  the  solemn, 
sweet  quaver  and  fervent  ring  of  the  Methodist  hymns  had 
sunk  in  silence,  and  Mistress  Hcphzibah  had  departed,  trust- 
ing that  the  misguided  young  woman  had  gone  to  sleep 
with  something  better  in  her  mind  than  she  was  accustom- 
ed to  have  there,  Yolande  lay  and  thought  painful  thoughts. 
She  had  borne  the  first  brush  of  misfortune  gallantly,  and 
made  a  good  defense  while  she  was  still  in  the  thick  of  the 
fight.  Now  that  the  worst  was  escaped,  and  there  might 
at  least  have  been  a  breathing  space  for  a  rally  of  her  forces, 
she  only  debated  whether  she  should  not  ask  to  be  led  into 
the  presence  of  the  old  squire,  and  make  a  declaration  of 
her  innocence  to  him,  even  though  she  should  fall  down  on 
her  knees  and  beseech  him  to  believe  her.  But  he  was  the 
father  of  the  man  she  loved,  and  exculpating  herself  to  the 
one  was  like  seeking  indirectly  to  excuse  herself  to  the  other. 
She  felt  the  words  would  die  upon  her  lips.  She  would 
rather  go  out  wronged  and  maligned  in  the  judgments  she 
most  cared  for  than  have  recourse  to  such  means  to  alter 
them.     Before  the  air  of  the  Mall,  which  was  so  refreshing 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  281 

to  others,  should  stifle  her,  or  its  hospitable  roof  crush  her, 
she  would  be  goue  back  forever  to  her  poor  home  and  her 
own  Grand'mere.  But  then  how  should  she  face  the  rector 
and  Madame  Rolle,  who  had  been  kind  to  her,  now  that 
Milly  was  miserably  gone  ?  Milly  being  the  principal  suf- 
ferer by  her  own  folly,  Yolande  had  ceased  to  think  of  her- 
self and  her  own  wrong,  having  been  trained  up  by  Grand'- 
mere to  believe  that  she  was  her  brother's  keeper. 

In  the  morning  it  was  settled  that  young  Caleb  Gage 
should  start  at  once  for  the  Shottery  Cottage,  to  solicit  a 
private  interview  with  the  family,  and  communicate,  what 
they  would  doubtless  be  thankful  to  hear,  the  comparative 
honor  and  safety  of  the  daughter  of  the  house.  Yolande 
herself  would  set  out  under  the  more  proper  wing  of  Mis- 
tress Hephzibah  or  Libbie,  and  arrive  in  time  to  confirm  Ca- 
leb's statement,  and  throw  herself  on  the  mercy  of  the  friends 
whose  friendship  she  had  spurned. 

The  old  squire,  urged  by  his  benevolence  and  his  regard 
for  Grand'mere,  would  have  journeyed  himself  on  the  er- 
rand, painful  though  it  was,  but  he  was  not  the  eye-witness 
of  what  his  son  had  need  to  set  forth  plainly  ;  and  Squire 
Gage's  relations  with  the  head  of  the  Huguenot  family  in 
the  person  of  Grand'mere  had  been  so  much  more  intimate, 
that  it  seemed  there  would  be  greater  delicacy  in  the  young 
man's  discharging  the  unwelcome  task.  Besides,  the  squire 
had  been  for  some  time,  with  a  little  pain,  perhaps,  but  a 
great  deal  more  pleasure,  withdrawing  himself  and  putting 
forward  his  successor  in  the  more  active  duties  belonging 
to  his  station,  with  which  this  neighborly  office  might  be 
classed. 

Caleb  rode  along  by  the  pastures  and  the  edge  of  the 
Waliste  in  a  wild,  windy,  rainy  morning,  only  partially  re- 
covered from  his  disorder  of  the  previous  evening  by  the 
tossings  of  a  sleepless  night.  As  he  proceeded,  he  felt  some- 
thing of  a  wild  man's  savage  satisfaction  in  the  weather,  in 
the  landscape  which  he  loved  being  blurred  and  blotted  out, 
because  he  was  deadly  sick  at  heart.  Yet  it  would  not  have 
signified  to  Caleb  though  all  the  haunts  of  bird  and  beast, 
and  all  the  tokens  of  man's  dominion  over  them,  had  been 
spread  out  in  their  freedom  and  fineness  of  detail  before 
him.  The  broad  whole,  which  was  a  glorious  marvel,  and 
every  individual  part  of  it  which  was  a  wonder,  would  not 


282  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

have  arrested  and  occupied  him  at  the  moment,  for  all  his 
inclination  would  have  been  to  shake  his  fist,  and  hold  up 
his  hand  to  Heaven  against  the  dominant  white  blot  of  the 
Rolles1  castle,  which  lay  like  a  treacherous  spider's  web  in 
his  path. 

But  what  if  old  Madame  Dupuy  should  not  believe  him 
against  the  Rolles,  who  had  nattered  and  befooled  the 
Frenchwoman  at  one  time  or  another,  as  lie  had  heard  ? 
What  if  she  should  suspect  him  of  feigning  the  character  of 
mediator,  and  of  having  himself  been  an  actor  in  the  run- 
ning off  he  had  pretended  to  have  come  upon  ?  "What  if 
she  should  fancy  that  he  had  become  the  inventor  of  a  ma- 
licious falsehood,  in  order  to  turn  away  suspicion  from  him- 
self and  cloak  his  own  guilt  ?  Such  guile  was  not  without 
its  parallel  any  more  than  the  deed  of  violence  which  it 
would  seek  to  screen.  Grand'mere  knew  the  Rolles  better 
than  she  knew  him  ;  and  while  they  had  been  her  professed 
friends,  he  had  been  all  but  her  declared  enemy,  and  from 
what  she  had  learned  of  his  sullen  pride  and  resentful  vin- 
dictiveness,  she  might  suppose  him  capable  of  a  base,  coward- 
ly, cruel  retaliation  on  her  involuntary  offense.  These  dis- 
quieting thoughts  occurred  to  Caleb,  and  kept  time  with  his 
gallop. 

When  Caleb  reached  Sedge  Pond  he  heard  that  Monsieur 
had  not  yet  returned,  and,  from  his  having  taken  exactly 
the  opposite  road  to  that  which  he  ought  to  have  pursued, 
he  argued  that  Monsieur's  return  would  not  be  a  speedy 
one.  He  had  set  out  in  full  chase,  with  a  flourish  of  the 
trumpets  of  his  woe ;  and  although  Caleb  should  have  ac- 
knowledged that  the  poor  fardgr'e  tradesman  had  shown  more 
human  nature  in  the  proceeding  than  in  others  which  had 
gone  before  it,  yet,  in  his  distempered  condition,  he  only 
writhed  anew  at  the  fresh  publicity  which  had  thus  been 
given  to  Yolande's  offense. 

Finding  himself  at  the  garden-gate,  which  he  had  not  en- 
tered for  more  than  twelve  months,  Caleb  hammered  at  it 
till  two  porteresses  rushed  at  once  to  let  him  in.  Prie,  with 
her  head  swathed  in  a  huge  roll  of  flannel  resembling  a 
sh.iko,  appeared  in  breathless  haste  ;  but  she  Avas  outrun 
by  Deb,  who  in  one  night  had  shot  up,  like  the  bean-stalk 
of  the  redoubtable  Jack,  to  the  stature,  both  bodily  and 
mental,  of  a  giantess.     Her  clumsy,  massive  features  were 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  283 

now  positively  grand,  as  they  were  set  in  stanch  resolution, 
or  worked  with  slow  but  sleuth-hound  sagacity.  Both 
reached  the  gate  and  assailed  the  unlucky  new-comer: 
"  What  news,  master  ?  Where  be  the  child  ?  What  ha' 
they  done  with  her  ?" 

Caleb  Gage  was  reduced  to  such  a  state  of  suppressed 
passion  that  he  did  what  no  Gage  for  a  generation  before 
him  had  done — he  shook  off  his  fellow-creatures  in  distress, 
and  refused  to  relieve  their  anxiety.  He  bade  them  send 
the  old  Madame  to  him  on  the  instant,  and  strode  on  before 
them,  refusing  to  take  any  notice  of  them,  though  Deb  kept 
up  with  him,  and  plied  him  with  questions,  trying  even  to 
tempt  him  with  counter  information.  "  Pearson  he  corned 
home  late  last  night,  and  when  he  heered  one  of  his  darters 
were  gone,  and  how  and  with  whom,  as  old  Madame  here 
bade  him  be  informed  fust  thing,  well,  he  did  just  nothink 
at  all.  But  fust  he  went  into  a  towering  temper,  he  did,  and 
he  called  up  all  the  servants  as  weren't  gone  to  bed  on 
account  of  the  family  misfortune,  from  Harper's  Sally  to 
Black  Jasper,  and  bade  them  never  mention  Mistress  Milly's 
name  in  the  house  again,  as  they  valued  their  places,  and  to 
stop  all  search  for  her,  because  her  were  not  worth  it,  and 
he  forbade  it.  If  she  came  back  of  her  own  accord,  loike 
prodigal  son  did,  then  he  would  remember,  to  his  sorrow 
and  shame  (Madam  swouuded  dead  oif  at  them  words),  he 
were  her  fcyther;  but  not  till  then.  Howsomever,  old 
Madame  said  that  were  not  the  way  of  the  Good  Shepcrd 
— not  with  the  lost  sheep,  and  her  charge  were  with  the  ewe 
lamb." 

But  Caleb  Gage  thought  to  himself  that  the  rector  of 
Sedge  Pond  knew  best,  and  was  he  called  upon  to  expatiate 
to  the  servants  on  YolandeDupuy's  delinquencies?  It  was 
bad  enough  to  have  to  explain  what  he  had  seen  and  done 
to  those  who  were  entitled  to  the  information  at  his  hands. 
So,  silently  and  haughtily,  he  went  to  await  Grand' nure,  in 
the  cottage  parlor.  Once  within  the  Shottery  Cottage,  there 
came  a  revulsion  in  Caleb's  mood.  The  dark  and  sombre 
parlor  forced  itself  on  his  dazzled  eyes,  shining  with  the  re- 
flection of  love  and  duty.  To  another  its  wants  of  embel- 
lishment, and  complete  absence  of  any  evidence  of  recrea- 
tion or  diversion,  might  have  told  of  a  cramped,  chilled, 
stunted  life — its  deprivations  almost  a  warrant  for  outrage 


284  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

against  authority.  But  Caleb  Gage's  healthy,  genial  soul 
did  not  understand  such  an  argument,  with  God's  sun  over- 
head, and  his  green  earth  around,  and  down  in  the  depths 
of  the  human  heart  such  exhaustless  treasures  of  affection 
ready  to  spend  themselves  on  every  living  thing.  Though 
stupid,  and  smarting  under  a  blow,  he  could  not  shut  out 
what  he  saw  and  remembered  of  that  room.  There  were 
the  pillow  and  bobbin,  and  the  tapestry  frame  with  the  tasks 
half  finished,  lying  as  Yolande  had  left  them,  reminding  him 
that  the  Huguenot  women  worked  boxes  full  of  lace  and 
tapestry  for  Monsieur's  trade  stores.  But  Grand'mere  was 
fourscore,' and  Madame  was  the  house  mother,  and  was  too 
much  of  a  demagogue  and  declaimcr  to  speak  with  her  fin- 
gei-s.  It  was  by  Yolande's  unfailing  application  that  the 
task  was  accomplished.  And  Caleb  knew  that  there  is  no 
discipline  short  of  suffering  equal  to" the  noble,  self-denying 
discipline  of  honest  work — all  the  nobler  when  it  is  work  in 
an  intelligent  and  a  skillful  craft — a  trained  yet  voluntary 
contribution  to  the  great  prayer-offering  of  labor.  The 
temptation  which  would  prevail  over  an  undisciplined  va- 
grant-willed, idly-disposed  being  like  one  of  the  rectory  girls, 
must  be  widely  removed  from  that  of  a  dutiful,  meek,  close- 
ly-employed daughter  like  Yolande.  AYith  the  rectory 
girls,  home  pursuits  and  entertainments  were  all  mixed  up 
with  beads,  spangles,  and  tinsel,  powders  and  washes,  and 
not  with  long  spells  of  work.  Their  heaviest  labor  had 
been  to  hang  gaudy,  incongruous  patches  about  their  stom- 
achers and  trains,  making  them  more  like  peacocks  than 
ever,  till  they  cried  out  for  the  spots  on  their  tails  to  be 
changed.  The  most  humanizing  occupations  the  rectory 
girls  had  were  teasing  Black  Jasper  and  fondling  their  lap- 
dogs.  But  when  Yolande  had  a  brief  holiday,  as  in  the 
days  after  her  illness,  it  was  given  to  weed  and  water, prune 
and  guide  the  flowers  in  Grand'mere's  jardiniere,  to  note 
even  the  commonest  wayside  plant,  or  to  make  friends 
with  the  homeliest  animal  that  breathed.  And  there  still 
lay  her  silver  weeds,  the  broken-winged  sparrow  she  had 
saved  from  the  hawk,  and  the  crippled  field-mouse  she  had 
come  upon  in  the  furrow.  To  Caleb  Gage  the  works  of  God 
were  another  Word,  and  these  simple  tokens  so  many  com- 
mandments  to  reverence  and  purity,  so  that  to  quit  their 
devout  study,  and  indulge  in  levity  and  recklessness,  seemed 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  285 

to  him  well-nigh  incredible.  "  Will  a  man  leave  the  snow 
of  Lebanon  which  cometh  from  the  rock  of  the  field  ?  or 
shall  the  cold  flowing  waters  that  come  from  another  place 
be  forsaken  ?" 

Then  there  thronged  back  on  Caleb's  mind  all  Yolande's 
antecedents,  which  gave  the  lie  to  her  frailty.  Monsieur, 
he  felt,  was  only  a  degenerate  scion  of  his  sect,  and  he  had 
not  appreciated  Grand'mere ;  but  he  had  grown  to  fancy 
that  all  the  old  Huguenot  nobleness,  sincerity,  earnestness 
and  tenderness  had  revived  and  culminated  in  Yolande,  of 
whom  a  colt  like  him  would  have  none,  when  she  was  put 
by  a  miracle  within  his  grasp.  Was  this  the  stuff  that 
slight  women  are  made  of?  Was  this  the  girl  who  had  run 
off  with  the  Honorable  George  Rolle  and  his  cousin  Milly  ? 
More  baffled  than  ever,  though  less  utterly  miserable,  Caleb 
waited  for  Grand'mere. 

At  last  Grand'mere  entered  in  a  Lyons  silk  gown,  mob 
cap  and  mittens,  a  silver  dove  in  her  breast,  and  a  staff,  like  a 
cherry  with  a  cherry-stalk,  in  her  hand.  It  struck  Caleb 
Gage  that  the  old  Frenchwoman,  who  had  been  his  bete 
noire,  had  something  of  the  queen  about  her — something  of 
the  Berthas  and  Mauds,  mothers  of  their  people.  He  could 
not  help  feeling  abashed  before  the  old  Madame,  who  in  the 
midst  of  her  trouble  was  neither  impulsive  nor  extravagant 
in  her  welcome  of  him,  as  he  had  expected.  She  was  se- 
date, with  a  quiet  dignity,  in  the  keenness  of  her  intelligence 
and  her  mobility  of  expression,  which  would  not  break  out 
freely  now,  because  its  owner  could  rule  her  own  fine  spir- 
it. 

But  Grand'mere  was  not  alone.  Her  dark  satellite  of  a 
daughter-in-law  followed,  and  not  only  Madame,  but  Prie 
and  Deb  with  the  freedom  accorded  in  old  French  house- 
holds trod  on  each  other's  heels  in  the  doorway,  in  order 
to  hear  whatever  concerned  the  family.  And  Caleb  was 
called  upon  to  deliver  himself  of  his  detestable  mission  in  the 
hearing  of  the  whole  household!  It  was  all  over  with  Yo- 
lande so  far  as  hiding  her  fault  went,  but  Grand'mere  might 
not  be  aware  how  nearly  his  tidings  affected  her  child,  and 
it  was  barbarous  to  make  him  spread  them.  So  after  his 
low  bow  to  old  Madame's  low  courtesy,  he  said — 

"  Madame,  I  sought  to  speak  with  you  alone." 

Caleb's  head  hung  down  a  little  as  he  spoke,  and  he  pluck- 


286  THE   HUGUEXOT  FAMILY. 

ed  at  the  button  of  his  hat  and  the  naps  of  his  waistcoat,  be- 
traying that  lie  was  grievously  perturbed. 

<;  Monsieur,  there  can  not  be  too  much  linen  in  a  house- 
hold," replied  Grand'mere,  with  deliberate  and  as  it  sound- 
ed, mocking  sententiousness.  "  I  kiss  the  hand  to  him  who 
will  not  speak  in  a  high  voice  before  ray  people." 

"  As  you  will,"  yielded  Caleb,  in  indignant  despair.  "  I 
have  come  to  tell  you  that  Mademoiselle  is  found." 

"  God  be  praised !"  cried  Madame,  the  mother,  in  her 
sonorous  voice,  which  had  uttered  only  jeremiads  for  many 
a  day. 

"  The  Lor' — but  He  do  be  good  !"  burst  in  Deb,  with  an 
estasy  of  satisfaction  at  the  conviction  which  redeemed  the 
dishonoring  doubt  the  sentence  implied. 

"  Let's  go  to  the  chile.  You  imperent,  ignorant  babby, 
Deb  Potts,  get  out  of  my  way  now,"  insisted  Priscille,  put- 
ting her  best  foot  foremost,  and  plunging  with  her  head  aft- 
er it,  in  a  manner  which  threatened  to  land  her  in  the  cen- 
tre of  the  circle,  by  way  of  taking  a  step  to  Ma'mselle. 

But  Grand'mere,  with  her  high  spirit,  chastened  at  it  had 
been,  let  no  sign  break  from  her,  save  the  loveliest  pink 
blush,  like  that  of  a  maiden,  in  her  withered  cheek,  and  the 
glow,  as  of  golden  fire,  in  her  grey  eyes.  She  would  not 
show  what  had  been  her  faithlessness  by  praising  her  God 
now ;  she  would  not  compromise  her  child  by  confessing 
to  that  young  man  what  her  terror  for  Yolande  had  been  ; 
for  he  had  made  himself  strangest  of  the  strange  toward 
them.  Grand'mere  knew  what  the  odium  of  a  mariage 
manque  was  in  France,  and  how  hard  it  would  have  been  to 
bear  for  her  Yolande  there  ;  but  the  brutal  discourtesy  with 
which  this  young  man  in  England  had  added  insult  to  injury, 
along  with  the  errand  on  which  he  now  came,  was  more 
than  Grand'mere's  flesh  and  blood  could  stand,  and  she 
told  herself  she  did  well  to  let  him  feel  his  strangeness  now. 

"  Oui-da,  I  looked  for  the  discovery.  It  must  have  come 
sooner  or  later,"  she  observed,  composedly.  "  What  then, 
Monsieur  Caleb  ?" 

"  I  have  the  profound  grief — "  Caleb  hurried  on,  more  in- 
clined than  ever  to  break  down  in  ungovernable  passion,  un- 
called-for as  the  paroxysm  would  be  beside  Grand'mere's 
stony  insensibility. 

She  swerved  from  her  firmness  as  he  hesitated  to  pro- 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  287 

ceed.  "  You  do  not  say  a  young  Sainton  earth  Las  escaped 
from  men  and  devils  to  be  the  youngest  saint  in  heav- 
en ?"  she  asked,  with  a  quick  fluttering  of  her  heart,  but 
without  altogether  losing  her  composure  even  at  that  idea. 

"I  do  not  know  how  that  may  be,  Madame,"  answered 
Caleb  Gage,  losing  his  self-command  entirely.  "If  it  had 
been  a  young  saint  of  mine,  I  should  have  taken  care  to 
guard  her  with  soul  and  body  ;  as  for  yours,  she  intercept- 
ed me  last  night  after  nightfall,  while  I  was  on  my  way 
to  the  Mall.  She  was  running  for  aid  for  her  associates 
and  friends,  Mr.  George  Rolle  from  the  castle,  and  one  of 
the  young  Mistress  Rolles  from  the  rectory,  with  whom  she 
had  been  driving  to  destruction,  as  far  as  my  dull  Avits  could 
cope  with  the  circumstances,  when  they  were  overturned  in 
the  Whitecates  Road,  and  the  ditch  adjoining." 

"  Serve'  em  right,  if  Ma'msclle  lighted  on  her  feet !" 
exclaimed  Deb  emphatically. 

"  An'  weren't  none  of  her  tender  bones  broken,  be'st  sure, 
young  squire?"  Prie  urged,  recalling  him  to  the  important 
point  sternly. 

.But  Grand'mere  only  smiled  brightly.  "  The  little  one 
ran  for  aid  ?  Good  !  I  have  no  reason  to  doubt  what 
you  say,  Monsieur  ;  I  doubt  it  not.  Pardon  me,  but  the  act 
alproves  that  Avas  the  little  one  all  over." 

Caleb  stared  blankly.  Was  there  ever  such  reception 
of  such  tidings  ?  Were  all  the  Avits  of  the  Shottery  Cot- 
tage household  gone  wool-gathering,  and  was  all  feeling 
gone  after  them  ? 

Instead  of  answering  his  silent  protest,  Grand'mere  inclin- 
ed her  head  as  if  listening  to  the  distant  sound  of  wheels, 
though  he  could  not  hear  them. 

" duals"  she  cried,  " Yolandette  is  here !  But  stay,  I 
pray  you,  until  she  comes,  my  Monsieur,  and  Avesee  how  the 
culprit  looks." 

The  Mall  had  lent  Yolande  its  farm-wagon,  since  she  did 
not  chance  to  ride  Darby  and  Joan  fashion  with  Caleb  or 
his  father.  '  Libbie  Larkins  sat  beside  her,  gravely  mindful 
of  her  comfort,  and  gravely  watchful,  lest  a  naughty  young 
creature  Avho  had  been  within  a  hair's-breadth  of  the  sad 
end  of  naughtiness,  should  precipitate  herself  from  the  foot 
of  the  wagon,  and  run  away  again  at  the  last  moment. 
But  within  an  incredible  time  for  a  wagon  to  draw  up  and 


288  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

its  passengers  to  be  lifted  down,  Yolande  came  flying  along 
the  garden  path,  leaving  Libbie  Larkins  as  bewildered  as 
her  young  master  under  the  flash  of  new  light,  while  she 
panted  and  toiled  behind  her. 

Into  the  door,  into  the  parlor,  without  a  word  of  pardon, 
a  thought  of  shame,  ran  Yolande.  She  hugged  Grand'mere, 
embraced  her  people  all  round,  and  sobbed  and  laughed  at 
last,  though  it  was  no  laughing  matter.  "  3Iemdre,  I  have 
got  back  to  you.  Were  you  frightened  out  of  your  mind  ? 
But  little  Deb  saw  us  taken  prisoners.  Mafoi !  we  call  her 
little  because  she  is  great  every  way,  that  Deb.  But  what 
a  game,  Grand'mere !  It  was  worse  than  the  four  corners 
for  the  children,  and  we  no  longer  children,  and  the  month 
October,  and  not  April,  to  make  fish  of  us  !  Ah,  what  a  mis- 
erable game  and  fooling  for  the  poor  Milly  !  But  I  begin  at 
the  end.  Behold  me,  Grand'mere,  and  all  you  who  can  not 
help  believing  me.  I  am  back  ;  no  one  suspects  me,  no  one 
shames  me.     Ah  !  my  heart,  how  happy  I  am  1" 

"Chut!  peronnelle"  remonstrated  Madame.  "Grace 
of  God,  Yolande !"  she  reminded  the  girl  in  solemn  exulta- 
tion, "  the  good  God  of  the  Huguenots  faileth  never." 

"  If  little  Deb  had  been  bigger,  as  big  as  some  folk  a' 
know,"  declared  Deb,  sniffing  significantly,  "  some  other  folk 
'ud  ha'  smarted  for  putting  so  much  as  a  finger  on  Ma'm- 
selle." 

"  Nay,  now,  Ma'mselle,"  grumbled  Prie,  "  you've  been  and 
smirched  your  wrapper;  and  who  be  to  clean  you,  a'd  like 
know,  when  the  great  wash  be  long  done  ?  You  be  a  pret- 
ty young  'un  to  get  into  damage,  and  have  we  in  a  frenzy  for 
you,  and  let  your  body-clothes  be  done  to  sticks  to  boot." 

Grand'mere  almost  laughed  in  Caleb's  white,  melted,  avert- 
ed face.  Then  something  of  her  natural  graciousness,  dash- 
ed with  a  shade  of  scorn,  returned  to  her  face  and  voice. 

"  Monsieur,  my  young  Samaritan,  you  and  yours  are  truly 
good  Samaritans.  A  thousand  thanks  and  praises  for  that, 
and  for  your  succoring  the  child  in  her  need.  But  she  was 
not  a  thief,  though  she  fell  among  thieves.  What !  my 
friend,  was  it  necessary  that  you  should  be  told  that  ?  Where 
were  your  eyes,  your  heart  ?  Bah !  Monsieur  George,  her 
heartless,  heedless  assailant,  knew  better  than  that." 

"  Tt  is  true,  Madame,"  answered  Caleb,  with  bitter  morti- 
fication,  though  there  was  such  a  flood  of  sweet  satisfaction 


THE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  289 

at  the  bottom  of  his  heart,  that  it  welled  up  through  all  his 
hate  and  rage  agaiust  himself.  "  I  will  not  have  one  word 
of  thanks  or  praise.  No,  there  is  nothing  too  bad  to  say  of 
me  for  my  blindness  and  grossness." 

And  Caleb,  went  away,  knowing  that  Yolande  was  saying, 
"  Don't  be  hard  upon  him,  Grand'mere ;  he  showed  he  was 
my  neighbor ;  though  he  was  so  mad,  he  must  needs  believe 
his  eyes  against  me — me,  Grand'mere,  and  the  God  who 
made  me,"  and  saying  it  with  the  sweetness  of  her  restora- 
tion to  unsullied  innocence  and  crystal  truth.  To  Caleb  it 
was  like  a  restoration  to  Paradise,  for  a  blessed  vision  was 
swimming  before  his  eyes,  and  a  blessed  harmony  sounding 
in  his  ears,  comforting  him  for  his  harshness. 


CHAPTER  XXYI. 

THE   SEEVICE   REQUIRED    OF   THE    OLD   SQUIRE. 

"  My  son,  I  am  mightily  thankful  for  this  solution,"  said 
old  Caleb  Gage.  He  and  his  son  sat  together  in  the  chim- 
ney-corner, the  only  spot  sacred  to  them  in  their  own  roomy 
mansion,  at  that  hour  of  the  twenty-four — the  hour  of  setting 
the  large  establishment  in  order  for  the  evening  exercise, 
when  the  big  house-place  and  kitchen  were  vacant  of  other 
company. 

The  squire  was  seated  in  his  great  chair,  the  back  of  which 
rose  in  a  high  oaken  peak,  like  the  canopy  of  a  throne.  As 
he  sat  he  gazed,  with  the  thoughtful  pleasure  of  long  use  and 
wont,  on  what  were  in  themselves  not  disagreeable  objects 
to  contemplate,  or  at  least  not  less  attractive  than  the  spin- 
dle-legged furniture  and  fantastic  japanned-work  ornaments 
of  the  best  parlors  of  the  day.  On  a  sharp,  gusty  October 
night,  few  sights  could  be  more  welcome  than  the  great 
glowing  hearth — the  hereditary  post  of  the  ma>till*s.  terriers, 
and  colleys,  lying  curled  or  stretched  around  it  in  basking 
luxury.  In  keeping  with  the  hearth  were  the  settles,  only 
less  black  and  polished  than  the  rafters, together  with  Lib- 
bie  Larkins's  cluster  of  flitches  and  wreaths  of  pot-herl>s. 
The  burnished  copper  and  pewter  reflected  the  warmth  and 
brightness  quite  as  well  as  silver  and  china  would  have  done  ; 
while  the  squire's  favorite  books,  with  the  rich  tan  and  deep 

N 


290  THE   HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

brown  of  their  calf-skin,  were  not  a  whit  more  out  of  place 
as  silent  witnesses  to  the  traffic  of  a  kitchen,  than  as  solitary 
occupants  of  a  library,  with  its  state  prepared  for  them  alone. 
They  lent  the  power  and  grace  of  culture  to  narrowness  and 
rudeness,  the  honor  of  high  thinking  to  the  homeliness  of 
plain  living. 

The  young  squire  looked  less  in  love  with  his  position. 
There  was  all  the  difference  between  the  young  squire  and 
the  old,  that  is  commonly  recognized  between  the  flower  of 
men  and  of  women.  The  young  squire  had  a  man's  share  of 
sedateness  and  clearness,  and  of  that  coolness  which  is  not 
cold,  but  genial  and  fruitful  as  the  climate  and  soil  of  the 
temperate  regions  of  the  earth ;  and  the  old  squire  had  a 
woman's  generous  enthusiasm  and  fine  instinct,  with  her 
wonderful  power  of  self-abnegation  and  devotion.  And  on 
these  qualities  in  his  father,  young  Caleb  Gage  was  inclined 
to  lookwTith  tender  and  reverent  respect. 

Yet  young  Caleb  glanced  around  him  with  an  expression 
akin  to  disgust,  as  he  sat  in  the  settle,  and  fretted  in  gloom 
and  vexation,  while  bearing  his  father  company.  But  for  all 
his  sense  of  incongruity  between  his  wishes  and  his  surround- 
ings, Caleb,  in  his  uprightness  and  manly  broad-shouldered 
figure,  presented  a  less  striking  and  distinguished  personali- 
ty than  the  squire,  with  the  stoop  of  age  and  its  rugged  fur- 
rows, even  his  eyes  being  robbed  of  their  beaming  by  that 
other  world's  approaching  so  near  as  to  cast  its  shadow 
across  them. 

"  I  am  mightily  thankful  for  the  clearing  of  Ma'mselle," 
repeated  the  squire  ;  "it  was. a  dog's  trick  of  George  Rolle, 
and  silly  people  will  continue  to  tattle  of  what  they  can't  know 
the  rights  of,  there's  the  worst  of  it;  but  no  generous  tongue 
■will  bring  the  misadventure  up  against  the  young  woman. 
It  would  have  been  the  queerest,  most  distressing  trans- 
formation of  a  lamb  into  a  goat,  or  a  dove  into  a  crow — and 
you  know  the  contrary  natures  of  the  creatures,  son  Caleb 
— had  a  Huguenot  indeed,  of  old  Madame's  rearing,  been 
found  to  aid  and  abet  a  fine  gentleman.  I  don't  believe  in 
any  confusion  in  human  nature,  any  more  than  in  the  animal 
kingdom,  beyond  what  sin  breeds  ;  and  here  grace  abound- 
ed to  conquer  sin.  And  I  protest  I  was  slow  to  believe  in 
poor  modest  Ma'msellc's  delinquency  all  of  a  sudden.  Now 
that  I  come  to  think  of  it,  I  am  astonished  that  you  could,  sir. 


THE   IIUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  291 

As  her  bated,  provoked,  true-spirited  grandmother  demand- 
ed, where  were  your  eyes,  where  was  your  heart,  young 
man  ?" 

"You  know, father, I  was  always  a  stupid  dog,  a  dolt, an 
idiot ;  but  for  all  that,  you  ought  to  make  the  best  of  me," 
half  groaned,  half  grumbled  Caleb,  divided  between  discon- 
tent Avith  himself,  and  a  general  quarrel  with  the  world. 

"  I  do  make  the  best  of  you,  my  boy,"  answered  old  Ca- 
leb, demurely,  "  particularly  as  you  are  not  quite  such  an  ill- 
conditioned  oaf  as  it  is  your  pleasure  to  represent  yourself. 
And  after  all,  Mr.  George  and  that  foolish  infatuated  lass 
of  the  rector's  may  not  have  undone  themselves,  either, 
so  clean  as  we  are  inclined  to  conclude,"  he  ended  more 
gravely. 

But  young  Caleb,  awkward  and  uncomfortable  as  he  was, 
had  his  own  reasons  for  not  letting  the  conversation  drop, 
or  suffering  it  to  diverge  to  the  desperate  circumstances  of 
Mr.  George  and  Mistress  Milly. 

"  So  you  marvel,  sir,  at  my  setting  down  Mademoiselle 
Dupuy  as  an  accomplice  in  her  elopement,  when  she  made 
neither  complaint  nor  defense  to  me  worth  speaking  of,  to 
account  for  her  situation  ?"  returned  Caleb,  staring  at  the 
wall  opposite  him,  as  if  he  were  viewing  the  facts  of  the 
case  inscribed  there  altogether  in  the  abstract. 

"The  depredators  were  already  punished,  the  havoc  they 
were  working  was  like  to  stop,"  argued  his  father.  "  You 
did  not  ask  the  girl  a  single  word  to  warrant  her  in  at- 
tempting to  exculpate  herself.  Your  behavior,  by  your  own, 
account,  was  considerably  stronger  evidence  of  your  ill-will 
and  rancor  toward  an  unfortunate  Huguenot  family,  than  I 
could  have  believed  you  capable  of,"  ended  the  squire  a 
little  testily,  owing  to  the  pain  it  gave  him  to  speak  severe- 
ly to  his  son.  But  he  returned  almost  immediately  to  his 
usual  frank,  trustful  tones:  "You  see  I  deal  plainly  with 
you,  lad,  as  the  kindest  mode  in  the  long  run." 

"I  want  you  to  deal  plainly  with  me,  whether  kind  or 
unkind;  you  could  not  be  unkind  to  me — of  course  that  is 
nonsense,  sir.  But  you  really  think  that  I  condemned 
Yolande  unheard,  and  that  I  bear  a  rascally  ill-will  to  her 
and  her  family  ?" 

"Softly;  I  did  not  say  rascally,"  objected  the  squire,  a 
ffood  deal  vexed  and  puzzled.     "  By  the  bye,"'  he  went  on,  in- 


292  THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY 

terrupting  himself,  "  draw  a  pitcher  of  claret  for  yourself, 
if  you  care  for  it."  He  fancied  that  the  grimly  spoken 
words,  which  he  could  not  understand,  came  out  of  a  dry 
throat,  and  he  did  not  seek  to  confine  his  son  to  the  iced 
water  he  had  himself  taken  to  when  he  and  Mr.  John  Wes- 
ley were  students  together,  and  thought  tea  too  stimulating. 
"  Let  your  discourse  be  seasoned  with  salt — that  is,  not  the 
Attic  salt  of  pungent  wit  and  keenness  in  controversy,  but 
the  Christian  salt  of  strict  truth,  moderation,  and  as  much 
amiability  as  an  Englishman  can  muster.  Ah,  lad  !  if  thou 
hadst  but  known  my  old  comrade,  William  Fletcher  of 
Madeley,  with  every  look  and  tone  as  benign  as  it  was  firm. 
But  I  have  put  my  foot  into  it,  haven't  I  ?"  asked  the  squire, 
arresting  himself  with  a  mixture  of  consternation  and  lurk- 
ing fun — "  treated  you  to  a  hair  of  the  dog  which  bit  you, 
by  way  of  a  profitable  lecture  on  good  manners.  Seriously, 
Caleb,  I  opine  that  there  is  an  obliquity  in  your  vision  where 
these  French  folks  are  concerned.  Such  an  affection  doth 
trouble  many  a  man  who  is  otherwise  liberal  and  affable  in 
his  walk  and  conversation.  It  works  on  you  in  this  way, 
that  it  causeth  you  to  rise  off  your  wrong  side,  and  be  in 
your  wrong  mind  and  mood  whenever  this  subject  is  broach- 
ed, though  you  are  not  crabbed  or  churlish  on  other  sub- 
jects," concluded  the  squire  anxiously. 

Young  Caleb  laughed  a  short  laugh.  "Why,  father,  I 
thought  you  were  a  wise  man — deemed  an  oracle,  indeed,  in 
the  society." 

"  I  don't  know  that  I  ever  pretended  to  be  a  sage" — old 
Caleb  defended  himself  from  the  new  attack  with  crcat  com- 
posure  and  coolness — "  but  neither  am  I  aware  that  I  have 
said  or  done  any  thing  so  silly  on  the  present  occasion  that 
my  own  flesh  and  blood  should  twit  me  with  weakness." 

"  Oh  !  but  you  have  commtited  a  signal  error  this  time,  if 
you  never  made  one  before  in  your  life,"  protested  young 
Gage,  rising  and  looking  at  the  dogs,  and  stirring  them  with 
his  foot.  "  Look  at  Beaver,  father,  how  ragged  his  ears  arc, 
and  that  young  lurcher  is  getting  his  wisdom  teeth.  What 
do  you  call  yourself  when  both  you  and  your  friends  at  the 
Shottery  Cottage  mistake  love  for  hatred  ?" 

"  You  don't  mean  to  say  that,  Caleb  ?"  exclaimed  Squire 
( lage,  laying  down  the  pipe  he  had  been  smoking  and  rising 
to  his  feet  in  sheer  amazement. 


THE    UUGUENOT   FAMILY.  293 

"  I  do  mean  to  say  it,"  Caleb  took  the  word  out  of  his 
father's  mouth.  "And,  more,  I  hold  that  too  many  cooks 
have  spoiled  this  as  well  as  other  kail — the  worse  luck  to 
the  supper,"  he  finished  ruefully. 

"No,  but  you  must  have  been  as  perverse  and  peevish  as 
a  woman,"  remonstrated  the  squire,  "  and  I  reckoned  you 
such  a  reasonable,  sensible  lad.  If  any  young  man  was  safe 
to  know  his  own  mind,  I  thought  it  was  you,  who  are  like 
a  rock  for  steadiness  and  solidity.  Oh,  dear  !  I  have  been 
mistaken  in  you,  Caleb." 

"I  am  sorry  for  it,  sir,"  Caleb  confessed.  "I  always 
knew  myself  to  be  good  for  nothing,  and  something  of  a 
hypocrite ;  not  that  I  lent  myself  to  regular  imposition, 
but  I  was  only  quiet  because  I  am  such  a  slow,  stolid 
mule,  and  you  offered  me  no  pretext  for  breaking  out ; 
you  were  too  good  to  me,  and  affronted  me  into  my  best 
behavior ;  and  see  how  ill  I  have  behaved  on  the  first  prov- 
ocation." 

"  But  I  don't  know  that  you  have  behaved  so  ill,"  the 
squire  said,  quickly  relenting ;  "  your  conduct  in  a  woman 
would  have  been  counted  only  natural  indecision  and  insta- 
bility— but  you  of  all  men  !" 

"Don't  shame  women  by  the  comparison,"  Caleb  said 
impatiently  ;  "  don't,  for  the  sake  of  my  mother." 

"  If  your  mother  had  lived,"  the  squire  proceeded,  soft- 
ening into  still  greater  tenderness,  "  she  would  have  made  a 
better  handling  of  this  business  than  I  and  my  fine  old 
Madame  have  done.  Not  that  Madame  Dupuy  is  a  clumsy 
fool,  or  that  I  had  no  experience  of  her  management,  bad  as 
English  usage  was  against  it.  The  old  country  gentry  have 
entered  into  family  alliances  often  enough,  and  the  leaders 
of  the  society  of  Methodists  have  proposed  marriages  for 
their  members — only  Ave  called  them  marriages  in  the  Lord, 
and  not  manages  de  conveyance  /  and  I  have  lived  long 
enough  to  know  that  there  is  a  great  deal  in  a  name.  You 
take  away  my  breath,  Caleb,  but  don't  let  us  get  into  anoth- 
er  monstrous  misapprehension.  You  have  taken  a  late  fan- 
cy to  this  Mademoiselle,  whom  I  always  thought  to  be 
charming,  bidding  fair  to  be  'good,  and  fair,  and  learned,' 
eh  ? — as  that  other  she  I  loved  from  the  first  moment  I  saw 
her — but  who,  when  she  was  first  proposed  to  you,  you  de- 
clined." 


294  THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

"  Don't  be  hard  upon  me,  father,"  pleaded  the  young 


man. 


"Am  I  hard?  But  what  if  you  should  change  your 
mind  again?  What  if  you  don't  know  it  even  yet,  my 
lad  ?  What  if  this  be  compassion,  contrition,  a  genteel 
amends^  to  the  poor  young  creature  who  has  been  badly 
dealt  with  by  a  rogue  of  quality,  as  any  man  with  the  name 
and  feeling  of  a  man  would  grant  ?  I  would  not  be  against 
any  fellow's  being  generous  to  a  girl  on  a  pinch ;  but  this 
is  being  overgenerous." 

"  Of  course  I  can  not  convince  you,  if  even  you  choose  to 
doubt  it,"  asserted  Caleb,  while  he  walked  up  and  down  ; 
"but  if  you  will  only  think  to  what  I  subject  myself  by 
this  confession,  and  the  way  in  which  my  hopes  of  success 
have  been  diminished  by  my  own  thickness  of  head  and 
hotness  of  temper,  you  will  see  that  it  is  not  at  all  probable 
that  I  should  talk  myself  into  the  vainest  of  passions,  or  get 
up  an  attachment  almost  certain  to  cover  me  with  chagrin 
in  the  end.  Is  it  not  more  credible  that  I  should  fight 
against  it  as  long  as  I  was  able,  and  only  give  way  to 
it  when  I  co»ld  no  longer  keep  it  down,  and  when  I 
judged  that  it  was  but  honest  to  myself,  and  no  more  than 
her  due, to  say  it  was  all  my  fault,  and  bear  the  penalty?" 

"Yes,  there  is  some  reason  in  what  you  say," candidly 
admitted  the  squire. 

"Consider,  father,  that  whatever  motive  of  despair  or 
distrust  might  close  her  mouth,  it  could  only  be  because 
jealousy  and  doubt  conspired  to  put  me  beside  myself, 
that  I  was  driven  to  do  what  you  called  condemning  her 
unheard." 

"I  stand  corrected,  Caleb,"  said  the  squire  gently  ;  "not- 
withstanding I  can  not  get  rid  of  my  own  impressions  on 
the  matter,  and  they  don't  altogether  tally  with  your  con- 
clusions, man.     But  then  what  do  you  propose  to  do  ?" 

Before  Caleb  could  answer,  a  detachment  of  the  Mall 
company  bustled  in  with  batches  of  bread  and  pots  of  po- 
tatoes. 

"  Never  mind,  my  lad,"  his  father  hastened  to  console 
him.  "The  air,  even  though  it  be  somewhat  boisterous,  is 
refreshing,  and  before  turning  in  for  the  night,  I  like  to  step 
across  the  threshold  and  look  at  the  sky  the  last  thing, 
were  it  only  on  account  of  the  patriarchs  standing  in  their 


TLTE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  295 

tent  doors  and  worshiping  in  the  sudden  death  of  an  east- 
ern day  and  the  glorious  moon  of  an  eastern  night.  We 
have  plenty  of  time  to  settle  your  affair  before  the  evening 
exercise,  Caleb.  I  do  not  think  I  have  forgotten  that  my 
blood  was  young  once,  and  prickled  as  yours  does  now." 

Caleb  was  reconciled  to  the  interruption.  Like  most 
men,  he  could  speak  more  freely  as  he  strolled  with  his  fa- 
ther in  the  court  or  on  the  terrace,  or  as  they  stood  with 
their  backs  to  the  gable  of  the  porch,  seeing  each  other's 
faces  dimly  in  the  wavering  starlight.  Besides,  the  neces- 
sity of  giving  his  father  the  support  of  his  arm  under  the 
force  of  the  gusty  wind  drew  the  two  so  closely  together  in 
their  old  affectionate  relation  that  Caleb  did  not  hesitate 
to  come  out  with  another  grievance  which  was  troubling 
even  his  small  amount  of  expectation  of  a  happy  issue  to 
the  impeded  course  of  his  true  love. 

"  We  have  nothing  worth  offering  her  at  the  best,  father. 
You  do  not  suspect  me  of  reflecting  on  your  plan  of  life 
when  I  say  so  ;  what  was  good  enough  for  my  mother 
should  be  good  enough  for  your  son's  wife.  Still  we  can 
not  count  on  a  stranger,  a  delicate,  accomplished  young 
woman,  however  good,  having  any  stomach  for  becoming 
head-schoolmistress,  housekeeper  of  a  poor-house,  nurse  and 
what  not.  It  would  not  be  fit  to  ask  her  to  fare  as  we  can 
fare.  Though,  to  make  a  clean  breast  of  it,  it  seems  the 
only  honorable  step  that  is  left  to  me.  Mayhap  I  had  bet- 
ter drop  it  rather  than  mock  her  with  such  an  offer." 

"  Mayhap  you  had  better,  my  son,"  acquiesced  the  squire, 
more  merrily  than  he  had  yet  spoken,  clinging  to  the  care- 
laden  Caleb,  keeping  his  feet  and  piloting  himself  along  the 
terrace  in  the  wake  of  his  son,  "if  she  do  not  think  your 
offer  a  worthy  one  after  her  own  granddame  and  guardian 
made  choice  of  you  ;  if  a  Huguenot's  daughter  can  not  fare 
as  the  jewel  of  the  Nenthorns  of  Stavely  was  proud  and 
happy  to  fare,  and  to  till  the  offices  which  she  filled  well — 
then,  in  the  name  of  common  sense,  call  quits  with  the 
scheme." 

"  But,  really,  do  you  think  it  was  ever  a  practical  scheme, 
sir?  Do  you  think  it  would  still  be  possible  to  renew  the 
broken-off  attempt  at  an  alliance?" 

"As  for  that,  I  always  understood  that  it  was  you  your- 
self, my  friend,  who  stood  as  stiff  as  a  halberdier,  and  form- 


29G  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

ed  the  insurmountable  obstacle.  You  must  give  me  a  little 
time  to  collect  my  scattered  thoughts ;  for  if  I  made  one 
master-blunder,  it  is  like  I  fell  into  a  dozen  anent  the  ques- 
tion, which  I  might  pass  to  you  as  lights  and  guides." 

"  No,  no,  father,"  insisted  Caleb,  "  tell  me  what  you 
thought,  and  let  me  judge  as  to  the  blunders." 

"  An  humble  suitor  !  I  like  not  to  do  it,  lad,  for  pamper- 
ing your  besotted  vanity,"  the  squire  said  quickly,  having 
committed  himself  by  a  rash  hint,  and  feeling  the  necessity 
of  fighting  off  from  an  explanation. 

"The  vanity  being  so  mortal  already,  a  truce  to  it.  You 
must  speak  out  to  me,  sir,  since  you  are  my  sole  adviser," 
enjoined  the  young  squire,  with  eyes  the  sparkling  of  which 
was  hidden  by  night. 

"  Good  lack !  it  is  a  fine  office,"  protested  the  squire,  still 
reluctant  to  express  his  convictions.  "Much  thanks  I  am 
like  to  get  when  she  avenges  herself  by  giving  you  the 
sack  without  remedy.  No,  no,  Caleb,  don't  believe  that ; 
but,  in  troth,  I  am  affrighted  I  may  mislead  you." 

"  It  strikes  me,  sir,  that  it  is  somewhat  late  in  the  day  for 
that  apprehension.  Come,"  out  with  your  conjecture  or 
cogitation,  whatever  it  was." 

"  I  ought  not  to  betray  a  tender  lass,"  alleged  the  squire, 
becoming  himself  as  confused  as  a  girl. 

"What  have  you  to  betray?  Unless,  in  good  earnest, 
you  have  betrayed  yourself  already.  I  can  give  you  no 
peace  until  you  follow  up  your  intimation." 

"  As  if  you  were  giving  me  peace,  you  young  rebel," 
groaned  the  squire;  "and  my  breath  a'most  gone  with  these 
scuds.  Come  into  the  porch  again,  Caleb.  Well,  it  comes 
to  this,  that  I  did  think  the  fine  young  Frenchwoman — fine 
by  nature,  not  by  art — was  inclined  in  the  beginning  to  look 
as  sweet  as  her  shyness  and  her  self-respect  would  let  her 
on  my  bumpkin  ;  "  and  it  went  to  my  heart  to  see  her  balked 
of  her  innocent  maidenly  faucy  by  no  fault  that  I  was  free 
to  charge  upon  any  body,  but  by  one  of  those  mischances 
of  this  world,  the  foundations  of  which  are  out  of  course. 
However,  as  I  also  imagined  that  you,  sir,  looked  as  surly 
as  the  east  wind  on  her  pretty  homage,  I  would  not  have 
you  give  a  fig  for  my  idle  guess." 

"  At  least,  you  never  let  me  know  of  the  suspicion,"  sug- 
gested Caleb,  with  confusion  burning  in  his  brown  cheek, 


THE    HUGUENOT   FxUIILY.  297 

to  which  his  father's  was  light ;  "  not  when  you  sounded 
me  on  my  views  as  to  marriage,  and  my  feelings  for  the 
family  at  the  Shottery  Cottage." 

"  No,  Caleb  Gage,  no  more  than  she  spoke  up  for  herself 
when  you  wronged  her;  and  I  trust  you  do  me  the  justice 
to  credit  that  I  would  have  died  sooner  than  make  such  a 
communication  to  my  own  son,  if  he  had  not  spoken  to  me 
as  he  has  done  to-night,"  affirmed  the  old  man  with  dig- 
nity. 

"Not  to  make  me  happy,  father?"  murmured  Caleb, 
pressing  up  to  him. 

"  You  silly  lad,  there  would  have  been  no  question  of 
making  you  happy  then ;  but  only  of  causing  a  young  lass, 
who  was  too  good  for  you,  to  hang  her  head  foolishly." 

Then  old  Caleb  Gage  let  out  his  satisfaction,  amounting 
to  exultation,  in  his  son's  having  come  round  heartily  to  en- 
tering on  the  proposal  of  early  wedlock  with  Grand  mere's 
child,  on  which  he  had  looked  favorably  from  the  first. 
With  all  the  squire's  charity,  he  was  not  able  to  hold  in 
very  high  esteem  squires'  daughters  like  Milly  and  Dolly 
Rolle,  and  though  he  doubted  not  that  they  might  grow 
into  tolerable  wives  and  mothers  at  the  end  of  a  score  of 
years,  he  had  rather  that  they  did  not  serve  their  appren- 
ticeship for  that  period  at  the  Mall.  Such  young  women 
as  they  might  consent  to  do  it,  balancing  all  young  Caleb's 
bodily  and  mental  endowments,  and  the  future  disenfran- 
chisement  of  the  Mall,  against  their  horror  of  Methodism. 
But  the  struggle  of  warring  tastes  and  tempers  which  would 
ensue  could  not  be  an  agreeable  or  profitable  experience, 
especially  to  the  old  squire,  with  regard  to  whom  the  most 
he  could  hope  for  from  one  of  these  daughters-in-law  was 
that  she  should  humor  and  tolerate  the  master  of  the  house 
as  half  a  dotard  and  half  a  fanatic.  And  young  Caleb  was 
too  loosely  attached  to  the  Methodist  body  not  to  have  of- 
fended its  leading  members,  so  as  to  render  it  improbable 
that  he  should  marry  into  the  society.  His  father  had 
therefore  been  sometimes  visited  with  concern  on  his  son's 
account,  lest  he  had  erred  in  his  philanthropy,  and  proved 
improvident  and  inconsistent  to  the  extent  o(  being  less 
than  kind  to  his  own  flesh  and  blood,  by  rendering  it  a  pre- 
carious venture  for  the  young  squire  to  marry,  if  he  re- 
solved to  do  so,  in  his  own  rank  of  life.     But  Mademoiselle 

N  2 


298  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

and  her  tidy  little  dowry  solved  every  difficulty  now,  when 
a  solitary,  eccentric  life  had  begun  to  loom  as  an  imminent 
danger  for  the  son  of  the  man  who  held  a  noble  woman  as 
God's  best  gift,  and  which,  granted,  made  every  toil  and 
sacrifice  possible  and  easy. 

True,  it  was  uncertain  whether  the  influential  old  mother 
who  represented  the  Dupuys  would  consent  to  take  up 
afresh  and  renew  the  contract  at  the  point  where  the  Gages 
had  offensively  stopped  short.  There  might  be  a  rigid 
French  code  of  propriety  against  such  fickleness.  The 
Dupuys  might  have  formed  other  projects  for  Yolande,  and 
kept  them  private  because  one  of  their  own  countrymen 
figured  as  principal  in  them.  Or,  in  spite  of  the  late  out- 
rage, the  household  at  the  Shottery  Cottage  might  now  feel 
themselves  more  settled  down  at  Sedge  Pond,  and  in  less 
urgent  need  of  allies.  In  their  ignorance,  they  might  not 
appreciate  the  damage  done  to  Yolande  by  the  little  frolic 
of  Mr.  George  Rolle ;  and  Grand'm6re,  the  old  squire  felt, 
was  the  last  woman  in  the  world  to  seek  to  hush  it  up  and 
mend  it  by  hurrying  Yolande  into  the  formerly  talked-of 
marriage  with  Caleb  Gage.  And  lastly,  even  the  manly 
part  which  Caleb  had  played  in  the  outrage,  carried  out  as 
it  was  under  a  miserable  and  mortifying  misconception,  was 
not  calculated  to  recommend  him  to  tender-spirited  and 
high-minded  women  like  Grand'mere  and  Yolande. 

But  old  Caleb  Gage  was  nevertheless  sanguine.  He  was 
ready  to  throw  himself  into  the  breach  and  bear  the  burden 
of  another's  conceits  and  vagaries.  To  do  this  for  his  son, 
who  was  ordinarily  so  wise  and  reasonable,  that  his  late 
temper  and  conduct  could  only  be  accounted  for  by  a  love- 
disturbed  brain,  with  its  heady  fumes,  would  give  him  the 
purest  delight.  He  would  have  out  his  nag  and  saddle- 
bags the  first  thing  in  the  morning,  and  ride  across  to  Sedge 
Pond,  and  be  himself  the  bearer  of  the  regret  and  repent- 
ance, the  confession  of  hastiness  and  willfulness.  He  would 
at  the  same  time  solicit  and  plead  for  the  restoration  of  the 
terms  which  had  already  been  laid  down  and  shabbily 
treated. 

In  the  mean  time,  standing  in  the  porch  in  the  fitful  star- 
light, he  forgot  the  cold  and  the  gloom,  and  expounded  to 
itching,  half-amused  ears  what  he  called  the  "illustrious 
gain"  which  the  presence  of  a  gentle,  refined,  intelligent, 


THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  299 

godly  woman  was  to  a  family,  and  the  pinching  loss  it  had 
been  to  him  and  Caleb  to  be  confined  for  so  many  years, 
even  to  the  best  of  the  Libbie  Larkins  and  the  Mistress 
Hephzibahs  among  womankind.  Not  that  the  good  crea- 
tures were  not  true  women  in  their  best  features,  but  they 
wanted  the  tact,  the  discrimination,  the  rich  sympathy  and 
wide  charity  of  his  dame,  and  were  no  more  to  be  compared 
to  her  "than  clambering  peas  to  mantling  vines."  The 
squire  by  intuition  and  deduction  ranked  Yolande  among 
these  fair,  wise,  virtuous  women,  and  prophesied  her  em- 
inence and  the  rare  gift  that  her  presence  would  be  to  the 
Mall,  until  it  almost  sounded  as  if  he  looked  for  the  return 
of  his  Lucy,  who  had  gone  from  him  so  early.  In  his  ex- 
citement he  even  called  Yolande  by  the  name  of  Lucy,  and 
spoke  eagerly  of  the  improvements  which  would  be  made 
and  the  progress  which  would  be  attained  when  Lucy 
should  be  with  them. 

The  great  bell  clanged  for  the  exercise,  and  the  conversa- 
tion of  the  squire  and  his  son  was  abruptly  brought  to  a  ter- 
mination. The  two  went  in  with  the  rest  of  the  big  motley 
family,  and  sat  among  the  company  of  preachers,  licensed 
and  unlicensed,  the  widow  and  the  orphan,  the  maimed,  the 
halt,  and  the  blind.  The  squire  did  not  conduct  the  serv- 
ices, but  only  took  his  turn  with  the  others  as  Brother 
Gage.  But  this  chanced  to  be  his  night  to  preside.  ITe 
read  as  his  passage  of  Scripture  the  last  chapter  of  Job, 
and  to  the  marvel  and  mystification  of  many  of  his  hearers, 
he  returned  thanks  in  his  prayer  for  a  treasure  which  had 
been  taken  away  from  the  Mall,  and  of  the  return  of  which 
there  was  good  hope. 

The  last  words  the  squire  said  to  Caleb  before  retiring 
were  still  full  of  the  past  and  the  future : 

"  Lad,  I  have  bethought  me  of  something  that  was  your 
mother's  to  give  to  Yolande.  I  mean  her  work-table.  She 
kept  that  when  she  disposed  of  every  thing  else  that  be- 
longed to  her,  even  to  her  harpsichord.  I  think  she  might 
have  kept  that  when  I  kept  my  books,  for  sure  noble  verse 
is  made  to  be  wedded  to  sweet  music,  and  methinks  string- 
ed instruments  were  constructed  to  compass  the  union,  that 
it  might  sound  its  best  to  praise  God  withal.  Hut  my  dame 
had  not  a  tuneful  ear,  though  she  was  in  all  else  as  many- 
sidedly  tuneful  as  the  wind  or  the  waters.     But  sec  now,  her 


300  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Huguenot  daughter  might  have  brought  the  harmony  of 
Clement  Mariot's  psalms  from  the  dumb  wood  and  ivory,  for 
these  foreigners  have  a  skill  of  their  own  in  harmony.  How- 
ever, Lucy  could  put  her  table  to  use  in  the  making  of  coats 
and  garments,  like  Dorcas — the  end  to  which  she  was  thence- 
forth to  devote  her  needle.  Here  is  the  key,  I  have  kept  it 
at  my  watch-guard  till  now,  when  I  deliver  it  up  to  you 
until  the  day  when  you  can  make  free  to  hand  it  to  your 
dame  that  is  to  be.  Had  this  been  July,  and  not  October, 
I  might,  French  fashion,  have  taken  a  posy  in  my  hand  from 
you  to  her  to-morrow,  and  sent  you  no  farther  than  the 
hedges  to  gather  it,  for  those  women,  with  a  right  down 
love  of  flowers — and,  bless  you,  I  like  the  sign — don't  mind 
though  they  be  scarcer  or  no  more  scented  than  hawthorn 
or  honeysuckle." 

The  next  morning,  when  the  good  squire  was  called  be- 
times to  set  out  on  a  bridal  errand  for  his  son,  he  was  found 
lying  solemn  and  serene  on  his  widowed  bed,  having  de- 
parted overnight  on  a  sudden  journey,  with  the  gift  of  the 
faithful  remembrance  and  the  tender  admiration  of  his  brave 
manhood  and  age  in  his  hand,  wherewith  to  greet  his  wife 
in  the  city  from  which  there  is  no  going  out. 


CHAPTER  XXVII. 

THE    SQUIRE'S    LAST    FEAST. 

The  news  that  he  who  had  been  squire  of  the  Mall  no 
longer  dispensed  its  bounty  and  charity,  caused  no  little  ex- 
citement in  Sedge  Pond  and  the  neighborhood.  Those  who 
had  not  cared  to  acknowledge  his  acquaintanceship  since  he 
had  changed  his  religion,  as  well  as  those  who  had  profited 
by  his  Methodism  and  its  institutions,  regarded  this  as  an 
occasion  which  could  not  be  missed  for  repairing  to  the 
Mall  to  join  the  funeral  gathering.  Crowds  congregated 
in  the  court  and  on  the  terrace,  and  streamed  through  all 
the  doors,  which  on  this  day  had  been  thrown  wide  open. 
They  wandered  over  the  house,  and  wondered  at  the  trans- 
formations upon  it,  and  passed  below  the  denuded  pictures, 
where  painted  eyes,  incapable  of  new  light,  seemed  from  their 
cold  exultation  to  challenge  the  crowd  as  they  pressed  along 


TUE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  301 

below.  But  the  most  hostile  ancestral  figures  did  not  hinder 
the  humblest  of  the  mourners  from  penetrating  into  the  room 
where  the  coflin  rested  on  its  trestles,  ready  for  removal, 
nor  from  reading  the  name  and  the  age  of  the  old  squire, 
though  both  were  well  enough  known  to  his  contemporaries. 
Afterward  they  visited  the  Academicia,  now  bereft  of  its 
patron  and  restored  to  its  old  use.  Long  boards  had  been 
set  in  the  low-roofed,  dark-paneled  room,  to  bear  refresh- 
ments ;  and  the  guests  walked  up  to  murmur  a  word  of  con- 
dolence, or  silently  to  take  the  hand  of  the  new  squire,  the 
central  figure  in  the  gloom,  as  he  sat  there  in  his  mourning- 
cloak,  the  representative  of  the  house  and  the  master  of  the 
feast. 

In  those  days,  when  roads  were  bad  and  traveling  difficult, 
when  old  neighbors,  and  even  near  relations,  sometimes  did 
not  meet  for  years,  the  protracted  ceremony,  with  its  attend- 
ant hospitality,  was  reckoned  a  simple  act  of  respect  to  the 
dead,  and  of  consideration  for  the  living,  which  no  person, 
whatever  his  religious  or  political  opinions,  was  warranted 
in  neglecting.  People  of  both  sexes  and  of  all  classes  and 
ages  attended  such  gatherings,  sometimes  from  a  mixture 
of  motives.  To  some  it  was  an  opportunity  for  meeting 
company ;  others  regarded  it  as  a  concession  to  the  prior 
claims  of  the  Great  Debtor;  and  perhaps  more  viewed  it  as 
a  good  occasion  for  paying  early  court  to  the  rising  sun — 
the  squire  who  was  to  be,  whose  character  as  squire  was 
still  to  be  made,  and  who,  if  he  had  offended  any  of  the 
prejudices  of  his  fellows  as  squire-apparent,  had  it  yet  in  his 
power  to  make  amends  by  reforming  the  errors  and  rem- 
edying the  abuses  which  had  existed  under  the  old  regime. 

Various  other  impulses  actuated  the  huge  assemblies 
which  gathered  at  funeral  feasts  in  those  days.  Not  the 
least  of  these  was  a  sense  of  obligation  to  close,  if  possible, 
a  generation's  feud,  and  thus  set  at  rest  the  qualms  of  con- 
science awakened  by  an  old  opponent's  having  passed  ir- 
revocably beyond  the  old  circle  of  friend  and  foe. 

And  special  circumstances  combined  to  render  the  gath- 
ering at  old  Caleb  Gage's  burial  a  curiously  large  and  mot- 
ley one.  The  untoward  state  of  the  weather,  the  sudden 
showers  of  snow,  fast  heralding  winter,  did  not  diminish 
it,  though  it  promised  to  render  the  pall  and  the  new-made 
grave  whiter  than  "  the  white  flowers  of  a  blameless  life," 


302  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

which  the  dead  man  had  worn.  The  old  squire  who,  in 
his  life,  had  been  pointed  at  as  a  fifth  monarchy-man  out  of 
season,  a  seditious  revolutionist,  a  canting,  blaspheming 
Methodist,  like  many  another  chief,  received  an  ovation  now, 
when  he  was  no  longer  here  either  to  profit  or  to  be  spoiled 
by  it.  Had  the  Apostle  Paul  died  when  he  was  called 
mad  by  the  Governor  Festus,  he  might  have  had  a  notable 
funeral,  attended  not  only  by  the  empty  chariots  of  his 
judges,  but  by  some  of  the  august  magnates  themselves — 
King  Agrippa  and  Queen  Bernice  winding  up  the  proces- 
sion in  the  very  state  with  which  they  came  to  hear  his  ac- 
cusation and  defense.  Men  of  every  shade  felt  at  last  that 
there  had  been  something  in  a  high  sense  noteworthy  and 
true  in  Caleb  Gage's  life  of  fervent  faith  and  entire  conse- 
cration to  deeds  of  benevolence,  though,  in  its  course,  it 
had  been  seen  only  in  glimpses  and  fragments,  and  had  ap- 
peared to  them  full  of  paradoxes,  failures,  and  absurdities. 
Men  who  had  never  set  a  foot  within  Caleb  Gage's  house,  or 
looked  on  his  living  face,  traveled  a  dozen  miles  to  witness 
Ins  institutions,  now  that  the  testing  seal  of  death  was 
stamped  upon  them.  It  was  as  though  a  wonder  of  his 
age  was  being  removed  from  their  midst.  Few  near 
Sedge  Pond  knew,  or  could  have  known,  of  another  and 
even  greater  man  protesting  against  the  racket,  the  hard 
worldliness,  and  worse  than  pagan  unbelief  which  then 
prevailed — the  simple  sailor,  Captain  Coram,  who  at  that 
very  time  was  inaugurating  charities  more  extensive  than 
princes  had  founded,,  and  dedicating  to  the  best  service  of 
God  and  of  humanity  the  gallant  life  which  had  been 
spared  in  battle.  It  was  not  only  the  eager,  fervent  Meth- 
odists who  believed  that  there  would  be  a  harvest  from 
that  funeral  feast,  and  that  Caleb  Gage,  like  Samson, 
would  slay  the  Philistines  in  his  death  as  in  his  life,  and 
possibly  more  in  the  last  than  in  the  first,  because  it  is  an 
eternal  law  that  the  seed  can  not  be  quickened  unless  it 
die.  If  there  is  any  higher  element  in  humanity,  any  pow- 
er of  receiving  the  Divine  leaven,  it  was  not  unreasonable 
to  hope  that  some  who  came  to  the  Mall  to  scoff  might  re- 
main to  pray. 

To  not  a  few  tenants  of  the  Mall,  Caleb  Gage's  funeral 
day  was  the  celebration  of  a  long  farewell  to  the  old  home. 
True,  the  old  squire  himself  could  not  have  been  more  in- 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  303 


capable  than  was  young  Caleb,  of  roughly  dismissing  an- 
cient guests,  or  having  recourse  to  any  but  the  most  grad- 
ual method  of  change,  since  it  affected  those  for  whom  his 
father  had  so  labored  and  suffered.  But  it  was  impossible 
that  the  Mall  could  continue  the  rallying-ground  and  train- 
ing-school of  the  sect  which  it  had  materially  helped  to 
form.  The  yeoman-like  preachers,  who  were  even  now 
falling  into  knots  to  discuss  the  late  squire's  interpretation 
of  the  little  horn  of  Daniel,  or  the  seventh  vial  of  the 
Apocalypse,  must  come  to  more  practical  matters,  and 
choose  a  new  interpreter  and  leader. 

(  And  as  much  the  squire's  charge,  and  as  liable  to  be 
scattered  by  his  death,  were  the  young  apprentice  boys 
and  girls  who,  set  idle  for  the  day,  were  half  tempted  to 
think  it  a  holiday,  since  it  was  not  in  reason  to  expect  that 
their  round,  ruddy  faces  could  be  sobered  to  meet  the  re- 
quirements of  the  occasion.  But  even  here  and  there 
among  them  were  thoughtful  brows  and  tearful  eyes. 

The  patient  incurables — most  patient  of  all  the  sick  in 
the  squire's  hospital,  and  the  most  permanently  established 
of  his  family — were  limping  and  shuffling  and  groping 
about  among  the  company,  so  accustomed  to  human  suffer- 
ing and  the  reverses  of  earth,  that  it  did  not  seem. there 
could  be  a  calamity  or  bereavement  on  which  they  would 
not  turn  placid,  almost  smiling  faces.  There  was  another 
class  of  invalids — bronzed  soldiers  and  sailors,  with  their 
wounds  and  their  scars,  half  subsisting  on  their  pensions, 
and  half  on  the  feats  of  their  dogs,  and  on  their  stories  of 
land  and  sea  fights,  foreign  countries,  and  great  hurricanes. 
There  were  traveling  tailors,  saddlers,  tinkers,  glaziers,  and 
pedlars,  who  ought  to  have  been  men  of  substance  and  re- 
pute, but  who  had  lost  caste,  and  were  discarded  by  their 
more  prosperous  brethren.  Following  on  their  heels  came 
the  privileged  beggars,  the  more  privileged  if  they  happen- 
ed to  be  crazy — down  to  the  very  gipsy  whose  camp  was 
pitched  on  the  Waiiste,  and  who,  whatever  his  origin,  was 
still  the  Canaanite  among  the  lowest  of  the  Israelites.  But 
the  most  touching  and  comforting  of  the  pictures  in  the 
rag-fair  were  the  poor  outcasts  whom  the  squire  had  been 
able  to  draw  from  the  kennel,  and  had  left  behind  him, 
cleansed,  clothed,  and  in  their  right  minds.  As  to  the  Al- 
chemy by  which  he  did  it,  one  might  be  content  with  refer- 


304  THE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY. 

ring  to  certain  chapters  in  the  Bible,  in  which  it  is  record- 
ed how  one  sat  at  His  feet  washing  them  with  her  tears, 
and  wiping  them  with  the  hair  of  her  head,  until  He  said, 
"  Thy  sins  are  forgiven  thee ;"  and  how  another  was 
brought  before  Him  by  her  Jewish  accusers,  to  whom  He 
turned  and  declared,  "  Neither  do  I  condemn  thee;  go,  and 
sin  no  more." 

Thus  were  met  old  and  young,  rich  and  poor,  man  and 
maid,  as  well  as  matrons  carrying  little  children,  that  they 
might  be  able  to  say  in  after  years  they  had  been  present 
at  the  Mall  on  the  occasion  of  the  great  funeral  feast  of  the 
good  squire,  whom  in  his  day  their  mothers  had  heard 
called  mad.  Most  of  the  people  wore  mourning,  either  in 
their  whole  attire  or  in  rusty  scraps  and  small  touches.  A 
favorite  costume  with  the  women  was  black  scarfs,  and 
white  gowns,  emulating  the  snow  on  the  ground  outside, 
and  the  shroud  within  the  coffin,  as  well  as  being  significant 
of  the  hardy  stoicism  and  determined  endurance  of  the 
age. 

There  were  two  little  family  groups  which  kept  some- 
what sedulously  apart,  and  yet  could  not  quite  withdraw 
their  eyes  and  their  thoughts  from  each  other.  At  the 
head  of  the  first  was  the  rector,  grown  grey  suddenly  as  it 
seemed,  who  had  been  heard  saying  shortly  and  sharply 
that  he  would  not  have  missed  this  funeral  feast  at  any 
price,  or  for  any  excuse.  With  him  was  Madam,  wan  and 
woe-begone  in  her  old  comely  fairness  and  stoutness.  She 
had  dragged  her  feet  into  company  and  forced  back  her 
heavy  tears,  even  on  the  convenient  occurrence  of  a  funer- 
al, because  it  was  her  Philip's  will  to  brave  out  and  live 
down  the  dreadful  misfortune  which  had  befallen  them. 
Dolly  came  after  her  father  and  mother,  looking  cowed 
and  deserted,  and  causing  the  spectators  to  rub  their  eyes 
at  sight  of  the  familiar  mantua  and  hat  without  the  other 
mantua  and  hat  which  were  wont  to  accompany  them. 
The  whole  of  the  Holies  were  distinguished  by  the  absence 
in  their  dress  of  the  mourning  so  generally  worn.  Black 
Jasper  walked  last ;  he  was  easily  moved  to  tears,  and  he 
improved  the  opportunity  by  crying  copiously.  He  only 
intermitted  the  operation  when  a  hymn  was  raised.  Then 
he  would  wipe  his  eyes,  hold  up  his  head,  and  sing  with 
great  sweetness,  and  no  diminution  of  zeal  and  fervor,  for 


THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  305 

the  trifling  objection  that  he  was  unacquainted  with  either 
words  or  tune.  His  indignant  master  would  face  round 
upon  him  and  order  him  to  stop — now  that  blubbering, 
now  that  bellowing;  and  Jasper  would  duck  his  woolly 
head  and  try  hard  to  obey,  but  the  force  of  a  gushing  and 
musical  temperament  was  too  much  for  him,  and  before  any 
time  had  passed  Black  Jasper  was  oif  again  either  into  sob- 
bing or  singing. 

The  other  group  consisted  of  Grand'mere,  Yolande,  Mon- 
sieur (who  had  returned,  and  shrugged  his  shoulders  at  Ins 
vain  pursuit  of  his  daughter),  and  "Mr.  Hoadley,  who  had 
escaped  for  a  moment  from  his  hard  work  in  moral  sinks 
and  sewers.  Mr.  Hoadley  did  work  hard  and  unremitting- 
ly now,  in  a  desperate  attempt  to  make  up  for  his  former 
latitudinarianism,  though  Grand'mere  would  have  it  that 
he  must  leave  the  past  yesterday,  with  its  neglected  duties 
and  its  many  offenses,  as  he  must  leave  the  future  to-mor- 
row, with  its  anticipated  cares  and  toils,  to  him  who  alone 
is  sufficient  for  these  things.  Grand'mere's  party  was 
wound  up  by  Deb  Potts,  Avho,  arrayed  in  a  huge  black 
hood  of  Frio's,  looked  well  about  her,  and  took  "in  every 
thing  around  her.  The  men  soon  left  the  women — Mon- 
sieur to  go  on  other  errands,  and  Mr.  Hoadley  to  join  the 
rectory  family.  Mr.  Hoadley  was  some  comfort" and  of 
some  consequence  to  his  brother  churchman.  He  carried 
another  flag  of  truce  into  the  Methodist  muster,  .and  acted 
as  an  escort  to  the  depressed  and  affronted  Dolly,  damaged 
by  her  sister's  having  gone  lamentably  astray.  It  was  not 
that  Mr.  Hoadley  did  not  rejoice  like  a  man,  and  thank 
God  like  a  Christian,  for  Yolande's  deliverance,  though  she 
owed  it  not  to  him,  but  to  another.  But  the  fact  of  the 
young  squire  of  the  Mall,  and  not  Parson  Hoadlcy's  having 
compassed  Yolande's  rescue,  was  not  without  its  effect  in 
raising  another  barrier  between  her  and  her  slighted  lover. 
Mr.  Hoadley  had  not  been  privileged  to  do  any  thing  for 
her  sake  but  to  throw  up  the  chaplaincy,  which  he  ought 
to  have  resigned  long  before  for  his  own'.  A  sense  of  fail- 
ure and  incompetency  where  she  was  concerned,  began  to 
haunt  and  chafe  him.  Where  was  the  use  of  his  continuing 
to  hang  on  the  skirts  of  Grand'mere  and  5Tolande5  when 
Grand'mere  herself  overlooked  him  at  the  Mall,  and  Yo- 
lande's manner  gave  the  impression  that  she  did  not  turn 


30G  TIIE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

her  back  upon  him  because  she  had  no  more  heart  or  spirit 
to  turn  her  back  upon  her  greatest  bane  ?  But  to  Mr. 
Hoadley's  sensitive  vanity,  her  meek  endurance  "was  even 
worse  than  her  sauciness — a  tiling  that  his  honorable  inten- 
tions were  not  fit  to  stand  any  more  than  his  abused  pas- 
sion and  his  bigoted  intolerance. 

Neither  Grand'mere  nor  Yolande  so  much  as  observed 
Mr.  Hoadley's  dejection  that  day ;  only  Yolande  had  a  pass- 
ing sense  that  the  yoke  on  her  neck  was  slightly  tightened. 
She  was  at  the  Mall  again,  happily  lost  in  the  obscurity  of 
a  crowd,  but  she  recalled  her  past  acquaintance  with  the 
place  with  a  sick  shudder.  The  very  hymns — songs  of  Zion 
— which  Mistress  Hephzibah  had  sung  to  put  her  to  sleep 
on  the  night  of  her  disgrace,  fell  on  her  ear  full  of  painful 
associations.  But  those  who  had  so  sedulously  entertained 
her  before  were  not  able  to  pay  much  heed  to  her  now. 
Libbie  Larkins,  inconsolable  because  she  could  even  so  much 
as  think  of  baked  meats,  was  too  much  engaged.  Mistress 
Hephzibah,  in  her  serener  atmosphere,  barely  noticed  the 
young  Frenchwoman,  and  tha.t  more  out  of  charity  than 
any  thing  else,  little  guessing  how  near  she  had  been  to 
having  her  for  an  honored  young  kinswoman. 

With  reverent  tender  regard  for  the  trying  solitude  of 
Caleb  Gage's  position,  and  with  a  flood  of  compunction  for 
her  bearing  toward  him  on  the  last  occasion  they  had  met, 
Grand'mere  followed  the  stream  and  approached  the  chief 
mourner.  With  sore  grief  for  his  grief,  with  yearning  pity 
that  was  all  the  more  pitiful  that  she  did  not  think  to  offer 
it  nor  dream  that  he  would  care  to  accept  it,  Yolande  glided 
like  a  shadow  after  Grand'mere. 

"We  are  so  sorry,  Monsieur,  we  can  not  say  how  sorry," 
declared  GraiuVmere,  earnestly.  "He  was  a  gentleman  as 
there  ought  to  be — gentle.  Wc  saw  him  only  so  many 
times,  but  he  was  our  true  friend.  If  he  had  tarried  here  a 
little  longer,  Yolande  would  have  sought  to  kiss  his  hands 
for  his  house's  roof;  but  the  roof  which  became  him  was 
the  cloudless  canopy  of  the  vault  of  heaven.  Monsieur,  you 
are  his  son — what  is  our  knowledge  of  him  or  our  loss  in 
him  compared  with  yours?  I  presume  not  to  lament  with 
you." 

Caleb  lifted  up  his  grave,  mournful  eyes,  and  looked  on 
the  pair.     If  any  thought  at  variance  with  his  situation  in- 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  307 

truded  itself  upon  him  be  hated  himself  for  it,  and  thrust  it 
away  from  him.  True,  his  father  had  rejoiced  in  his  slow 
and  sure  passion  ;  but  in  the  sudden  rending  of  the  first  ties 
of  nature,  Caleb  had  suffered  the  natural  revulsion  from  later 
ties  which  had  been  asserting  their  sovereignty  over  him 
and  superseding  the  first.  In  the  keen  awakening  to  all 
that  he  had  lost,  the  jealousy  of  bereaved  affection  and  its 
generous  remorse  for  the  smallest  shortcoming,  Caleb,  mod- 
est and  singlehearted  in  his  manliness,  took  himself  to  task 
for  his  failures  in  duty  and  love  to  such  a  father.  He  in- 
wardly accused  himself  of  having  been  engrossed  with  his 
willful  inclination  and  selfish  personal  interests,  and  with 
having  overlooked  and  neglected  symptoms  of  decay  in  the 
old  squire.  He  had  denied  his  father  his  society  and  sym- 
pathy on  many  a  day  during  this  summer  and  autumn, 
though  at  the  very  last  there  had  been  an  explanation,  and 
full  confidence  had  been  restored  between  them.  Caleb  be- 
longed to  his  dead  father  in  the  early  pangs  of  separation, 
and  his  dull  eyes  could  not  sparkle  even  for  Yolaude.  His 
tongue  stumbled  stiffly  as  he  said  that  every  friend  of  his 
father's  was  welcome  at  the  Mall,  and  more  welcome  now 
than  ever.  He  was  sure  Madame  Dupuy  was  the  squire's 
friend  (no,  he  could  not  call  him  the  late  squire)  ;  it  was 
kind  of  her  to  do  him  a  grace ;  and  he  begged  her  to  excuse 
his  poor  courtesy.  The  very  touch  of  his  hand  was  cold, 
and  he  said  to  himself  it  was  well  that  he  was  dead  to  other 
emotions,  which  read  like  vanities  now  that  he  was  father- 
less, even  while  he  had  a  conviction  that  he  was  cutting 
himself  off  from  complete  reconciliation  with  theDupuys,  and 
with  his  own  hands  destroying  the  remnant  of  an  intercourse 
which,  without  the  squire's  ready,  gracious  intervention,  it 
would  be  doubly  hard  to  renew.  On  the  other  hand,  if  Yo- 
lande  had  entertained  the  faintest  suspicion  of  what  had 
been  purposed,  if  the  true  love  between  the  young  man  and 
the  girl  had  been  a  happy,  admitted  love,  with  its  course 
running  smoothly,  she  would  have  asked  nothing  from  him, 
but  would  have  respected  the  oblivion  in  which  he  cast  him- 
self and  his  happiness  together  with  her  and  hers — would 
have  counted  herself  delicately  complimented  by  the  associa- 
tion— would  have  patiently  Mailed  and  waited  until  she 
could  softly  recall  him  to  his  own  and  her  claims. 

As  it  was,  Grand'mere  observed,  sorrowfully,  "  Lc  pauvre 


308  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Jils  !  We  can  do  nothing  for  him.  He  needs  us  no  more 
than  if  we  were  croquemorts."  And  Yolaude's  heart  died 
within  her,  and  only  revived  that  she  might  tell  herself  that 
she  was  a  selfish,  vain,  light-minded,  worldly  creature.  And 
when  she  had  succeeded  in  stretching,  laying  out,  and  bury- 
ing her  love  for  the  time,  she  could  turn  and  listen  to  Charles 
Wesley's  soaring  hymn,  and  be  inspired  and  borne  away  on 
its  strains. 

"  When  from  flesh  the  spirit  free, 
Hastens  homeward  to  return, 
Mortals  cry,  'A  man  is  dead!" 
Angels  sing,  '  A  child  is  born  !' " 

The  Dupuys  rode  home  to  Sedge  Pond,  market-fashion, 
on  a  wall-eyed,  spavined  horse,  hired  from  the  ale-house, 
with  Deb,  shouldering  Madame  Rougeole,  walking  along- 
side, in  case  the  beast  should  take  to  prancing  and  bolting 
under  its  burden.  Yolande  said  to  Grand'mere  as  they 
went — 

"  Grand'mere,  it  is  white  there  above,  and  white  there 
below,  and  it  is  we  who  are  like  black  flies  crawling  between. 
Does  nothing  whiten  us?  It  has  been  a  journey  of  mis- 
fortune this  to  the  Mall,  ma  mere/  we  ought  never  to  have 
made  it.  Petite  mh*e,  do  you  think  that  mistakes  commit- 
ted on  earth  are  cleared  up  in  heaven  ?  His  father,  saint 
and  sage  as  he  was,  died  believing  me  to  be  black,  and  lie 
believes  it,  for  he  believes  his  father." 

"Ma  toute  bonne"  replied  Grand'mere,  "leave  not  only 
vengeance,  but  justice,  to  the  Lord.  Oh  !  9a,  the  brightest 
thing  about  heaven  is  that  we  will  see  clearly  there.  Seest 
thou  not  thy  father  and  mother  here  ?  They  have  lived 
together  more  than  all  thy  life,  and  they  understand  one 
another  not  a  bit  more  than  they  did  the  first  day  they 
came  together.  They  are  like  planets  with  different  orbits, 
the  planes  of  which  never  cross.  You  and  I,  we  think  avc 
understand  each  other,  cocotte  ;  and  yet,  if  one  of  us  were 
to  die  to-morrow,  the  other  would  be  in  anguish  like  the 
gars  yonder,  to  find  how  many  nooks  in  her  own  heart  she 
had  kept  shut  up,  and  how  many  places  in  her  friend's  she 
had  never  so  much  as  sought  to  enter.  Every  one  liveth  to 
himself,  and  every  one  dieth  to  himself  in  that  sense;  and 
mil.  foil  -we  shiver,  we  grow  bad,  we  grow  mad  in  the  soli- 
tude, long  before  we  pass  the  great  portal,  if  the  Father  bo 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  309 

not  with  ns.  But  there — above,  Yolandette,  we  know  and 
are  known  ;  and  as  the  disciples  of  the  Master  would  know 
Him  no  more  after  the  flesh  once  they  bad  known  Him  in 
the  spirit,  so  shall  we  only  begin  to  know  our  people  cm 
fond,  and  laugh  at  the  ignorance  which  we  called  knowledge 
in  this  dim  cramped  menage  of  earth,  when  we  are  free,  and 
are  no  longer  self-blinded,  in  the  house  of  the  Father." 


CHAPTER  XXVIII. 

A  LIVING   SORROW. 

At  Sedge  Pond  rectory  this  autumn  life  was  sombre  and 
shaded,  notwithstanding  that  Mr.  Philip  Rolle  vehemently 
and  imperiously  insisted  that  he  and  the  remaining  members 
of  his  family  had  nothing  to  do  with  his  lost  daughter,  and 
should  neither  be  held  responsible  for  her  folly  nor  regarded 
as  sharers  in  her  punishment.  Stung  to  the  quick  by  what 
he  of  all  men  could  least  bear  with  any  show  of  equanimity 
— undutifulness,  levity,  and  vice  on  the  part  of  one  of  the 
daughters  he  had  cherished,  and  treachery  and  ingratitude 
on  the  part  of  one  of  the  Rolles,  whom,  next  to  his  own 
children,  he  had  loved,  and  whose  sins  he  had  failed  to  de- 
nounce— the  rector,  with  all  his  efforts  at  serenity,  evenness 
of  temper,  and  sociability,  was  sterner  and  more  austere 
than  his  household  had  ever  known  him. 

The  loss  of  Captain  Philip  had  not  so  affected  him. 
There  was  a  tender  pride  in  that  dead  sorrow,  a  loyal 
submission  which  brought  out  all  that  was  most  generous  in 
the  man  and  mostclevated  in  his  Christianity;  but  this 
wanton  dishonor  of  a  living  sorrow  put  an  iron  mask  on  his 
face  and  a  heart  of  stone  in  his  breast. 

Madam,  who  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  had  been  the 
most  dutiful  and  reverent  of  wives,  as  well  as  the  fondest  of 
mothers,  was  all  at  once  drawn  different  ways  by  the  ruling 
passions  of  her  being.  Sometimes  she  was  tempted  to 
think  that  the  rector  was  a  merciless  tyrant,  and  again 
that  her  miserable  Milly  had  never  been  any  thing  but  a 
wicked  baggage.  And  she  would  indulge  in  such  thoughts 
until  she  fell  into  a  chronically  hysterical  state,  when  she  was 
no  longer  lit  fur  her  housekeeping  and  cookery,  hut  wan- 


310  THE    HUGUE3TOT   FAMILY. 

derecl  about  pale  as  a  ghost,  putting  her  handkerchief  to  her 
eyes,  and  wringing  her  hands  whenever  she  got  into  a  snug 
corner. 

As  for  Dolly,  she  had  never  had  such  a  fit  of  the  dumpj3 
in  all  her  life.  Jn  the  first  place,  she  had  now  some  cause 
to  be  in  the  dumps.  She  deeply  felt  the  loss  of  her  play- 
fellow. It  was  lonesome  and  drear  for  her  to  be  day  and 
night  the  only  young  person  at  the  rectory,  unless,  indeed, 
Mr.  Hoadley  had  compassion  upon  her.  She  felt  it  all  the 
more  that  she  was  forbidden  to  complain.  Nor  was  this 
surprising.  She  had  grown  up  to  womanhood  without  any 
training  in  self-control  or  discretion.  Now  she  was  sud- 
denly gagged  and  frightened  into  trembling  silence  and 
whimpering  obedience  by  her  father's  single  display  of  in- 
dignation, and  his  instantaneous  renunciation  of  the  ofiend- 
er^Milly.  And,  moreover,  there  was  no  hope  of  an  end  to 
Dolly's  lowness,  for  let  her  be  sick,  or  in  as  pretty  a  passion 
against  Black  Jasper  or  the  maids  as  she  chose,  her  mam- 
ma hardly  noticed  her,  unless,  indeed,  to  take  fitsof  hugging 
her  and  crying  over  her,  which  was  but  poor  diversion  for 
Dolly.  If  she  so  mueh  as  dared  to  hint  at  going  on  a  visit 
to  a  neighbor,  or  a  ride  to  Reedham,  or  across  the  country 
after  the  hounds,  her  papa,  who  perhaps  had  forced  her 
abroad  with  him  only  the  day  before,  would  stare^contraet 
his  brows,  and  answer  her  sharply  in  the  negative,  lie 
would  then  walk  up  and  down  the  room  with  dreadful 
heavy  steps,  and  watch  her  jealously,  till  she  quaked  again 
lest  he  should  denounce  her  as  he  had  denounced  Milly. 
These  were  dull  days  of  fog  and  fall  to  Dolly  ;  and  though 
she  was  not  on  the  brink  of  spasmodic  rebellion  like  her 
mother,  her  dullness  was  embittered  by  a  sullen  sense  of  in- 
justice. How  could  she  help  Milly  turning  out  ill,  when 
Milly  had  not  taken  her  into  her  counsel,  but  had  chosen  to 
keep  company  with  Ma'mselle,  who  had  managed  to  get 
clean  out  of  the  scrape,  Dolly  being  cut  off  from  Ma'mselle's 
society  also  for  that  escape  ?  Was  she  to  be  punished  by  a 
life  of  suspicion,  tight  discipline,  and  harsh  gloom,  for  Milly's 
going  off  with  Mr.  George  Rolle  ? 

The  very  servants  at  the  rectory  went  about  their  Mar- 
tinmas work  with  the  consciousness  of  an  unspoken  calam- 
ity which  had  befallen  the  house, and  continued  to  hang 
<.\  er  it.     "  For,  see  now,"  as  they  said,  "  cruel,  good,  clev- 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  311 

er,  and  determined  as  the  rector  be,  can  he  destroy  an  evil 
deed  and  its  evil  work  by  merely  bidding  every  mother's 
son  or  daughter  hold  his  or  her  tongue  about  it,  and  forget 
that  it  has  happened  ?  Can  he  make  Mistress  Milly  be  as 
if  she  had  ne'er  been,  by  declaring  that  as  he  has  no  son  on 
earth — and  he  were  right  down  thankful  for  it  this  day, 
for  he  would  not  have  had  his  young  heir  smitten  with 
shame,  or  burning  to  avenge  a  sister's  stained  name — so  he 
has  but  one  daughter  now,  for  Mistress  Milly  be  his  daugh- 
ter no  more  ?"  But  could  he  bring  that  about  ?  Could 
Madam's  mother's  heart,  yearning  after  her  child  be  brought 
to  admit  that  there  could  be  an  extremity  which  would 
warrant  such  cold-blooded  wisdom  ?  True,  simple  folks 
were  bidden  keep  the  broken  from  the  whole — a  doctrine 
the  rector  was  forever  touching;  on  in  his  sermons  at  this 
time  ;  and,  as  the  Sedge  Pond  people  said,  "  It  were  like 
Mistress  Milly  was  no  longer  a  fit  companion  and  example 
for  Mistress  Dolly,  to  whom  she  used  to  be  as  much  the 
marrow  as  two  new  pins,  and  the  girls  as  inseparable  as 
any  pair  of  dame's  geese,  while,  lawk  !  their  lives  were  to 
run  in  opposite  directions  now,  the  one  to  light  the  other 
to  darkness.  Leastways,  so  Pearson  would  have  it.  But 
to  say  the  poor  erring  sinner  were  to  be  stamped  into 
nought,  as  well  as  given  over  to  destruction,  by  her  own 
kith  and  kin,  was  less  than  kindness — indeed  were  main 
malicious  and  vindictive  of  Pearson  in  plain  bodies'  eyes ; 
might  be  the  way  of  gentle  folks,  but  was  one  of  those 
forced,  unnatural  ways  which  the  commonalty  could  not 
understand." 

No,  the  rector  might  pack  his  skeleton  into  his  closet, 
and  shut  and  lock  the  closet  door  before  his  household's 
blinking  eyes,  but  he  could  not  insure  that  the  door  would 
not  open  of  itself  some  day  when  he  least  expected  it,  or 
that  Mistress  Milly  would  not  return  like  the  prodigal  son, 
in  which  ease  he  had  pledged  himself  to  receive  her.  Nev- 
ertheless, judging  by  his  present  conduct,  it  was  a  sorry 
reception  which  he  was  preparing  for  her;  ;is  unlike  iis 
possible  to  that  of  the  prodigal.  At  the  same  time  those' 
servants  of  the  rector's  who,  after  the  fashion  of  other  ser- 
vants, sat  in  judgment  on  their  master,  and  condemned 
him  without  hesitation,  were  impressed  by  his  calm  front, 
:i-  the  firmness  and  self-mastery  ofa  superior  nature  and  :i 


312  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

superior  nurture  will  always  command  respect,  if  not  love, 
and  compel  the  mass,  with  its  ill-regulated  and  demonstra- 
tive passions,  to  follow  and  defer  to  it. 

Black  Jasper  was  the  most  intractable  and  ungovernable 
of  the  rector's  troop  under  the  new  order  of  things,  not- 
vithstanding  that  the  fellow  had  all  the  docility  and  fidel- 
ity of  his  race.  He  could  not  comprehend  that  his  Massa's 
sister,  and  his  Massa's  Massa's  daughter  was  become  an 
outcast  and  an  alien.  He  would  incidentally  allude  to  her 
with  the  utmost  innocence,  while  beside  the  family,  half  a 
dozen  times  a  day.  He  was  constantly-making  prepara- 
tions which  had  reference  to  her  return.  He  would  come  in 
with  his  goggle  eyes  and  his  imperturbable  composure,  and 
ask  Madam  whether  he  had  not  better  air  the  cane-room 
for  Mistress  Dolly  lying  in  it  again  with  her  sister ;  wheth- 
er he  might  go  up  to  Farmer  Spud's  and  seek  after  a  pet 
lamb  "  against  the  young  mistress's"  appearance,  in  order 
to  surprise  her,  or  go  out  and  cut  rushes  to  stuff"  her  church 
hassock  with  them,  for  she  was  wont  to  -complain  of  it,  and 
it  was  unused  in  the  mean  time. 

The  rector's  eyes  would  sparkle  at  these  things,  and  in 
one  sense  they  quite  burned  up  Black  Jasper,  causing  him 
to  jump  from  the  spot  on  which  he  stood  every  time  they 
flashed  upon  him.  But  they  were  powerless  to  stop  his  oblig- 
ing mal-d-jirojios  proposals.  So  the  rector  in  despair  gave 
up  attempting  to  cut  Black  Jasper  short,  or  to  show  him 
the  door  in  the  middle  of  his  speeches. 

The  rector  afforded  another  contradiction.  Behind  backs 
Dolly  rated  the  stolid  Black  Jasper  soundly  for  his  doltish- 
ness,  and  .Madam  cried  out  fractiously,  "  How  can  you  bring 
forward  that  wretched  young  lady  m  your  speeches,  boy  ? 
Have  you  no  judgment  or  no  mercy  ?  You  may  see,  if  you 
like  to  look,  that  I  can  not  stand  it."  But  the  rector  was 
rather  gentler  to  Black  Jasper,  and  less  nettled  by  his  so- 
lemnity and  cowardice  than  formerly,  and  now  indulged 
him  more  frequently  by  speaking  to  him  of  Captain  Philip. 

The  frost-wind  of  adversity  was  blowing  into  the  shrink- 
ing breast  of  this  poor  family  ;  while  the  frost-wind  of  na- 
ture was  turning  black  the  garish  heads  of  the  great  sun- 
flowers in  the  rectory  garden,  and  causing  them  to  dangle 
dismally  on  their  nipped  stalks.  The  lime  for  the  sun- 
flowers was  over,  and  nothing  could  save  them  ;  and  for 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  313 

the  family  there  was  little  shelter  in  the  narrow  cloak  of 
pride,  resolution,  and  stoical  endurance.  There  was  little 
shelter  anywhere,  indeed,  save  in  the  wide  mantle  of  strong 
faith  and  meek  charity,  which  lies  waiting  the  use  of  ev- 
ery pilgrim,  but  not  till  his  wandering  foot  has  carried  him 
within  "  the  shadow  of  a  great  rock  in  a  weary  land." 

Madam  would  have  tried  to  win  and  wear  that  mantle, 
but  she  was  foiled  and  outraged  by  her  husband's  severity. 
The  rector  could  do  no  wrong,  and  yet  he  bade  the  weep- 
ing blood  of  a  mother  freeze  within  her  breast,  or  turn  to 
rankest  poison.  What  could  she  do  ?  How  was  she  to 
maintain  her  double  bond  to  the  husband  whom  she  had 
called  her  lord  and  master,  and  to  the  child  she  had  borne, 
suckled,  and  reared  ?  Poor  wives  and  mothers  thus  rent 
asunder,  and  called  by  warning  voices,  each  as  loud  as 
their  own  natures,  to  go  different  ways,  what  is  left  them 
in  such  tumult  but  to  quit  the  hopeless,  endless  strife,  to 
die  and  go  where  all  feuds  are  reconciled,  where,  under  the 
rainbow  round  the  throne  of  the  Great  Father,  all  claims 
are  blended,  satisfied,  and  set  at  rest  ? 

But  Madam  did  not  die  yet.  She  did  what  she  could 
never  have  believed  she  had  the  bold  spirit  to  do  ;  she  in- 
truded on  her  own  husband,  in  his  study,  during  study 
hours,  causing  him  to  lay  down  his  thesis  to  listen  to  her, 
when  she  addressed  him  with  a  challenge  that  was  almost 
a  defiance. 

"  Philip,  do  you  mean  that  T  am  to  give  up  my  child  ?" 
(she  no  longer  said  "our  child.")  "  I  can  not  tell  whether 
your  meaning  is  so  bad  as  that,  but  I  am  come  1<>  say  that 
I  can  not — I  can  not.  I  have  let  her  go  for  a  whole  month, 
unfeeling,  reckless  mother  that  I  am  !  Why,  the  beasts  of 
the  field  and  the  birds  of  the  air  would  have  risen  v.\>  to 
succor  ami  deliver  their  young.  But  lean  not  lie  so  un- 
natural any  longer;  so  you  may  lock  me  up,  or  tie  me 
hand  and  foot,  if  you  want  to  keep  me  quiet,  for  your  word 
has  no  more  power  to  do  it.      1  warn  you  of  that,  Philip." 

He  raised  himself  and  looked  at  her  with  the  wonder, 
compunction,  and  consternation  with  which  one  regards  a 
perfectly  harmless,  pacific  nature  at  hay  — a  sheep  daring 
the  dogs  lor  its  land i,  a  dore  ruffling  its  feathers,  screaming 
and  circling  between  its  nestlings  and  the  hawk.  "Com- 
pose yourself,  Milly,"  said  the  rector,  trying  to  re-assure 
1  o 


314  THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

Madam,  and  addressing  her  by  her  Christian  name,  which 
he  had  not  taken  within  his  lips  lately,  choosing  to  employ 
instead  the  terms  "  wife,"  "  dame,"  "  mistress,"  and  with  a 
little  irony,  "  lovey,"  and  even  that  title  of  "  mother," 
"  mamma,"  which  he  was  lending  the  force  of  his  absolute, 
intolerant  man's  will  to  make  a  crown  of  piercing  thorns  to 
her.  "  If  it  will  be  any  comfort  to  you  to  know,"  he  pro- 
ceeded, "  that  I  have  not  let  our  lost  child  go  without 
some  poor  security  for  her,  or  been  able  to  let  slip  entirely 
what  it  is  no  longer  any  thing  but  misery  to  remember — 
stay,  I  did  not  want  to  wound  you  afresh — here  is  a  note 
which  I  had  at  the  outset  from  my  lady,  and  she  will  keep 
her  word  ;  I  never  knew  her  fail  in  that,  either  for  good  or 
evil."  He  finished  with  a  groan,  and  taking  a  crumplcd- 
up  note  from  his  pocket-book,  spread  it  out  on  the  table 
and  drew  Madam  forward  to  read  it  over  his  shoulder. 

"  Philip,"  the  note  ran,  "  I  do  not  come  near  you  in  this 
horrible  misfortune  with  an  utterance  of  my  grief,  disgust, 
and  wrath  —  far  less  with  apologies  and  excuses,  which 
would  only  be  so  many  gross  insults.  But  I  come  to  re- 
mind you  that  the  villain  is  my  son,  though  I  say  it  to  my 
undying  confusion.  You  know,  thanks  to  my  late  lord's 
remorse,  that  I  can  buy  and  sell  this  fellow  where  he  stands, 
strip  him  of  his  lollypops  of  art  and  fashion,  and  send  him 
to  rot  in  jail.  He  shall  cither  stop  short  in  this  henious  of- 
fense against  you,  and  undo  it,  if  it  be  possible,  or  he  shall 
repair  it  with  the  best  he  has  to  give.  You  may  rely  on 
me,  Philip,  as  sure  as  my  name  is  Audrey  Rolle." 

"  Oh  !  why  did  you  not  show  me  that  before  ?"  remon- 
strated poor  .Madam,  in  excited,  quavering  accents.  "  Why 
was  I  not  told  that  my  lady's  powerful  interest  was  en- 
gaged for  my  child  ?" 

"  I  crave  your  pardon,  Milly,"  answered  the  rector,  still 
without  anger  at  his  unlimited  authority  being  thus  suddenly 
called  in  question.  "  I  fancy  I  thought  there  were  no  bounds 
to  your  trust  in  me.  I  hated  to  speak  of  the  calamity :  it  is 
like  touching  the  withers  of  a  galled,  snorting  horse — re- 
member that,  mamma.  And  it  Avas  no  such  comfort  either, 
ll  was  not  like  the  Shottery  Cottage  folk  having  the  glad 
assurance  of  their  lass  back,  uninjured,  within  an  hour  or 
tw<>,  the  moment  she  could  shake  herself  free — nothing  of 
the  sort.     Our  wrong-headed,  abandoned  girl  would  not 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  315 

accept  salvation.  What  can  my  lady  do,  though  her  will 
were  ten  times  as  all-powerful  and  unwavering  ?  Patch  up 
a  flawed  and  cracked  worldly  credit — which  I  am  not  con- 
vinced I  am  playing  the  honestest  and  manliest  part,  the 
part  most  becoming  a  Christian  and  a  clergyman,  in  even 
passively  consenting  to." 

Madam  was  easily  appeased  for  any  wrong  done  to  her 
own  rights,  and  almost  as  easily  buoyed  up  by  a  slight  flut- 
ter of  hope  for  Milly.  Besides,  she  had  a  pledge  of  her 
own,  lying  in  her  pocket,  and  about  to  be  brought  to  light, 
the  receipt  of  which,  the  day  before,  had  stirred  her  up  to 
make  her  unprecedented  attack  upon  the  rector. 

"Do  you  know,  papa,"  asserted  Madam,  in  a  little  willful 
delusion,  and  with  a  little  spite,  perhaps  pardonable  in  the 
circumstances,  "I  can  not  think  that  girl  from  the  Shottery 
Cottage  was  so  little  to  blame  as  they  make  her  out  to  be  ? 
They  have  so  much  guile,  after  ah,  the  best  of  these  foreign- 
ers ;  they  can  slip  put  of  scrapes,  and  leave  simple,  silly  lass- 
es, like  my  poor  Milly,  whom  their  French  fashions  have 
misled  in  the  first  place,  to  bear  all  the  brunt.  I  have  had 
a  letter,  too,  from  Mr.  Lushington,  letting  me  know  where 
the  unhappy  child  has  taken  refuge.  Don't  be  angry  with 
me,  Philip,  for  withholding  it  twenty-four  hours,  since  I 
dared  not  show  it  you  till  now." 

His  honor  gave  honor  where  honor  was  due,  so  that  his 
pothooks  started  with  the  words  "Honored  Madam."  He 
then  proceeded  in  no  dishonorable  or  unfriendly  spirit  to 
say  he  was  happy  to  inform  her,  now  she  was  in  trouble 
about  her  daughter,  that  Mistress  Milly  had  sustained  no 
serious  wrong,  and  was  in  safe  keeping.  He  could  speak 
with  authority,  for,  knowing  "our  Mr.  George's  stages,"  he 
had  himself  gone  early  on  a  day  following  a  night  that  she 
wotted  of  straight  to  the  Barley  Mow,  on  the  White  Cotes 
Road,  and  there  he  had  found  "  my  gentleman"  not  able  to 
stir  for  his  bruises  and  broken  bones,  from  the  place  where 
he  had  been  laid  down  by  his  body-servant  Harry,  and 
"there  were  ne'er  a  word  of  one  madam,  let  alone  two," 
but  Mr.  George  was  crying  like  mad  the  moment  he  heard 
tell  of  the  butler's  arrival.  Mr.  Lushington  should  but  bide 
a  stirrup-cup,  and  then  start  post-haste  to  take  Mr.  George's 
reply  to  three  billets  which  had  come  to  him  at  the  inn. 
They  were  all  marked  " speed,"  and   all  "required  an  an- 


316  TIIE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

swer."  The  first  Avas  from  Rolle,  to  give  his  brother  note 
that  a  certain  fine  lady,  a  bird  of  Mr.  George's  own  feather, 
for  whom  he  would  give  all  the  country  cousins  and  foreign 
traders'  daughters  that  ever  stepped,  was  to  be  at  a  certain 
great  house  on  a  certain  day ;  and  our  "  Mr.  George,"  he 
would  neither  be  to  hold  nor  bind,  if  he  were  not  up  and 
about  again  in  time  to  join  her,  especially  if  she  got  word 
of  what  had  kept  him.  Mr.  Lushiugtou  was  to  vow  for 
Mr.  George  that,  sure  as  the  clock,  he  was  to  be  there. 

The  second  letter  was  delivered  by  a  groom  of  Colonel 
Berkeley's,  who  was  riding  home  from  the  Norwich  boxing 
match,  and  had  dropped  in  to  drink  a  cool  tankard,  and 
leave  a  line  to  say  that  my  Lord  Coke's  man,  the  bruiser 
on  whom  Mr.  George  had  bet,  had  grown  dizzy  and  drop- 
ped in  the  first  round,  affording  some  fresh  sport  in  bets  as 
to  whether  he  were  fairly  done  for,  or  only  floored  for  that 
fight,  to  decide  which  properly  no  doctor  had  been  allowed 
by  the  gentlemen  to  touch  the  man  for  a  full  quarter  of  an 
hour.  However,  Colonel  Berkeley  would  thank  Mr.  George 
to  settle  his  little  aflair  by  the  bearer,  or  as  soon  as  ever 
he  could  make  it  convenient,  for  the  colonel  had  his  own 
book  to  square. 

Lastly,  as  it  never  rains  but  it  pours,  Mr.  George  had  a 
reminder  from  my  lady  that  she  left  him  alone  to  deal  with 
the  French  Ma'mselle  and  her  friends  as  he  thought  fit, 
though  it  did  not  seem  a  mighty  gallant  exploit  to  wage 
Mar  with  two  psalm-singing  women.  It  was  no  business 
of  hers,  and  she  had  already  taken  them  all  to  witness  that 
she  washed  her  hands  of  it.  But  if  lie  did  not  conduct  his  in- 
sulted kinswoman,  Milly  Rolle,  back  to  the  rectory  in  all 
honor,  without  the  loss  of  an  hour,  or  else  procure  a  license, 
summon  some  fellow  in  orders,  and  be  married  to  his  cousin 
on  the  spot,  she  should  not  allow  him  to  darken  her  doors 
again,  nor  should  he  have  a  farthing  of  her  money.  If  he 
should  venture  into  her  presence,  without  her  leave,  to  ap- 
peal against  her  sentence,  she  would  go  that  very  day  be- 
fore a  magistrate,  demand  protection  from  her  own  son, 
and  swear  that  her  purse,  plate,  and  jewels,  if  not  her  life 
itself,  were  in  more  danger  from  him  than  from  any  house- 
breaker  or  highwayman,  and  George  Rolle  knew  whether 
or  not  she  would  be  as  good  as  her  word. 

I  »ut  of  all  the  contents  of  the  epistle,  for  which  Mr.  Lush- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  317 

iugton  craved  Madam's  pardon — admitting  ingenuously  that 
it  was  as  heavy  a  spell  for  her  to  have  read  thus  far  as  for 
him  to  have  writ — what  concerned  Madam  and  his  rev- 
erence most  was,  that  they  at  the  rectory  were  not  keener 
to  get  their  young  lady  safe,  and  without  notice,  out  of 
Mr.  George's  keeping,  than  he,  Mr.  George,  was  to  be  quit 
of  her.  Madam  would  understand  that  Mr.  George  had 
paid  his  cousin  every  respect,  for  Mr.  Lushington  would 
say,  though  it  might  sound  a  contradiction  in  terms,  that 
if  a  Rolle  had  gone  nearer  to  ruin  a  woman,  he  would  have 
stood  firmer  by  her ;  if  he  had  been  a  world  cruder,  he 
would  have  been  a  deal  kinder  :  but  pity  him  for  such  kind- 
ness !  Now  Mr.  George  would  not  rest  till  he  had  sent 
Mr.  Lushington  helter-skelter  after  my  lady  to  inform  her 
of  his  accident,  and  to  swear  that  Mistress  Milly  was  under 
the  care  of  an  honest  landlady  till  Mr.  George  should  ap- 
prise the  Miss  that  he  had  grown  discreet  for  her  sake,  and 
declined  the  honor  of  her  company  any  farther,  being  mind- 
ed to  dispatch  her  home  by  any  mode  she  might  prefer. 

At  the  first  brunt  of  the  offense  the  young  mistress  was 
afeared  to  face  the  friends  whom  she  had  deeply  affronted, 
and  begged  to  be  forwarded  instead  to  the  family  of  an 
old  school-fellow  fifty  miles  on  the  other  side  of  lleedham, 
to  which  she  was  sent  with  all  care;  Mr.  Lushington  hav- 
ing to  plead  ignorance  that,  in  her  selfish,  childish  panic, 
she  had  not  consulted  with  any  of  her  friends  on  this  step. 
She  had  made  out  her  story  so  as  to  meet  and  explain  away 
the  surprise  felt  by  the  family  at  her  sudden  visit.  They 
had  been  satisfied  at  first,  but  a  week  later  they  had  got  an 
inkling  of  the  mischief  into  which  Mistress  Milly  had  run, 
and  from  which  she  had  come  fresh  to  them.  Indignant 
at  the  deception  which  had  been  practiced  upon  them,  and 
at  the  odium  they  might  have  incurred  from  receiving  a 
compromised  guest,  they  had  refused  thenceforth  to  believe 
any  part  of  Mistress  Milly's  stoiy,  and  with  very  little  cere- 
mony had  bundled  her  off  as  far  as  lieedham.  There  the 
culprit,  more  sensible  than  she  had  yet  been  of  the  error 
which  she  had  committed,  and  more  alarmed  than  ever  at 
the  idea  of  meeting  her  papa,  had  bethought  herself  of  de- 
ferring the  evil  day  while  her  little  stock  of  pocket-money 
lasted,  and  of  seeking  quarters  at  the  "Uolle  Arms,"  of 
which  Mr.  Lushington,  in  pursuance  of  an  old   intention, 


318  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

had  become  mine  host.  The  end  of  it  was  that  Madam  and 
the  rector  might  depend  upon  Miss  being  seen  to,  quietly 
and  "  very  genteel,"  till  they  should  claim  her,  or  make 
known  their  will  concerning  her. 

"  And  why  on  earth,  Milly,  did  you  not  instantly  make 
known  the  receipt  of  this  information  ?"  cried  the  rector, 
even  more  moved  by  Madam's  missive  than  she  had  been 
by  his.  "  It  is  of  the  first  consequence,"  he  went  on  ;  "  like 
a  reprieve  from  capital  punishment.  Did  you  not  think, 
woman,  that  it  would  be  the  gladdest  news  I  had  ever 
heard  ?" 

"  I  did  not  know  that  you  would  be  so  much  pleased  to 
hear  that  the  child  had  been  treated  as  the  Hancocks  have 
thought  fit  to  treat  her;"  and  here  Madam  hesitated  with 
an  accent  of  reproach — "  and  my  news  is  not  four-and-twen- 
ty  hours  old,  Philip,  while  yours  is  six  weeks  of  such  lan- 
guishing as  I  hope  never  to  live  through  again." 

The  rector  made  a  gesture  of  impatience. 

"  What  a  jumble  of  guilt,  and  the  consequences  of  guilt, 
you  women  make,  that  you  could  fail  of  such  knowledge! 
— that  you  could  confound  the  appearance  with  the  reality, 
and  the  mortal  pain  which  the  last  inflicted !  Is  it  ignorance 
or  innocence,  as  the  man  says  ?  Or  is  it  from  a  foreshadow- 
ing of  the  divine  pity,  which  is  ready  to  condone  all  offenses 
for  the  sake  of  the  offender?  It  doth  pass  my  comprehen- 
sion, Milly  ;  but  this  statement,  which  neither  we  nor  the 
world  have  any  reason  to  doubt,  blessedly  alters  the  whole 
matter." 

"Then  we  will  at  once  have  the  poor,  infatuated,  forsaken 
thing  back  among  us  again,  Philip.  My  poor  dear  girl, 
think  how  she  must  have  suffered  !  I  dare  swear  she  made 
no  false  representation,  or  told  so  much  as  a  fib,  to  these 
Hancocks,  of  whom  she  was  always  overfond — to  trust  them 
before  me !  But  she  could  not  tell  what  she  was  doing,  and 
the  mean,  pitiful  wretches  rejoiced  over  her  downfall,  and 
were  fain  to  persecute  and  cast  out  my  unhappy  darling." 

The  rector  looked  up  from  a  brown  study  into  which  he 
had  fallen,  with  a  startled,  offended,  stern  face  once  more. 

"  No  more  of  this,  dame  ;  don't  go  to  abuse  innocent  folk, 
in  good  truth  abused  enough  already.  Have  done  with 
such  weakness,  and  selfishness,  and  crying  injustice,  when 
your  own  child  is  concerned.     The  girl  has  gone  grievously 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  319 

astray  in  will  if  not  in  deed  ;  in  sheer  folly,  it  may  be,  but 
that  is  the  more  reason  she  should  be  brought  to  a  sense 
of  her  folly.  Had  the  worst  that  could  have  happened  be- 
fallen her,  she  would  not  have  wanted  the  lesson  from  us 
so  much;  for,  sure,  the  lamentable  sin  and  degradation 
would  have  brought  its  own  bitter  punishment.  But  now, 
after  working  scandal  in  a  clergyman's  household,  and  bring- 
ing herself  to  the  very  brink  of  shame,  she  will  think  she 
has  done  no  harm,  and  be  not  a  whit  abashed  nor  a  whit 
improved,  but  go  on  to  compass  more  giddy  romping  and 
gross  imprudence.  I  tell  you  I  will  not  have  it.  Bring 
her  back  to  the  rectory  at  once,  and  scot-free,  quotha?  A 
pretty  instance  of  discipline  to  set  before  my  parishioners, 
and  before  that  little  goose  of  ours,  her  sister  Dolly  !  How 
comes  it,  I  wonder,  that  we  have  so  much  more  senseless  chil- 
dren than  other  people's  ?  Ah,  I  am  aware  Philip  was  a 
pear  of  another  tree,  but  he  grew  as  he  hung,  out  in  the 
world,  far  from  our  espaliers,  which  is  no  compliment  to  our 
training.  But  bring  this  extremely  wrong-headed  and  reck- 
less young  woman — whose  greater  reproach  for  her  improp- 
er behavior  is  that  she  is  a  daughter  of  mine — under  this 
roof  again  without  her  undergoing  a  sharp  probation,  and 
affording  security  for  her  modesty  and  obedience  in  future 
— no,  verily,"  the  rector  went  on,  indignantly,  but,  seeing 
his  wife's  blank  disappointment  and  vexation,  he  turned, 
took  her  hand,  and  said  kindly,  "  nevertheless,  Milly,  let  us 
not  cease  to  be  everlasting  grateful  that  redemption  is  possi- 
ble." However  chagrined  and  mortified  Madam  was,  she 
could  not  find  it  in  her  heart  to  contend  any  longer  with 
the  rector,  even  had  she  not  returned  on  the  instant  to  all  her 
old  allegiance,  believed  the  rector  must  be  right,  and  been 
convinced  that  farther  contention  was  not  only  useless  but 
impossible. 


CHAPTER  XXIX. 

AN   UNFORTUNATE   YOUNG   LADY 

TnE  affair  ended  in  Milly's  undergoing  a  species  of  rusti- 
cation not  uncommon  when  girls  were  treated  like  naughty 
children,  and  children  were  put  into  corners  and  locked  into 


320  THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

dark  closets.  Milly  was  not  allowed  to  come  within  six 
miles  of  home.  She  was  boarded  with  an  old  nurse,  who 
had  married  Farmer  Spud,  at  Comer  Farm,  on  the  edge  of 
the  Waiiste.  Until  she  should  prove  that  she  was  sorry  for  . 
her  bold  trick,  and  was  prepared  to  be  quiet  and  careful 
in  future,  she  should  not  be  allowed  to  enjoy  the  dignity 
and  comfort  of  home  and  the  society  of  Dolly.  But  Milly 
did  not  arrive  very  readily  at  this  becoming  frame  of  mind. 
The  rector  had  conjectured  shrewdly  as  to  the  effect  of  her 
bad  conduct  on  her  mind,  and  took  care  that  in  the  arrange- 
ment for  disposing  of  her  on  trial  she  should  have  no  per- 
sonal interview  with  any  member  of  her  family.  She  got 
into  a  pet  at  the  way  in  which  she  was  treated,  and  let  them 
know  plainly  that  she  wanted  to  see  none  of  them,  till  they 
should  choose  to  put  her  on  equal  terms  with  them  again. 
She  would  not  have  her  sister  Doll  come  to  Corner  Farm 
to  crow  over  her,  and  look  down  upon  her.  "What  had  she 
done  except  have  a  bit  of  frolic,  such  as  any  body  would 
enjoy  if  they  cou'ld,  and  such  as  any  body  but  her  severe 
papa  would  have  passed  over  lightly,  more  particularly  as  it 
had  come  to  nothing  ?  She  would  hold  her  head  as  high 
as  any  of  them  yet. 

The  rector,  or  at  least  Madam,  fondly  hoped  that  a  few 
weeks'  banishment  in  mid-winter,  to  the  humble,  homely 
Coventry  of  Corner  Farm,  Avould  break  Milly's  refractory 
spirit,  tame  her  iVoward  temper,  and  teach  her  to  gratefully 
accept  her  father's  grace  on  any  terms.  In  the  mean  time, 
both  the  rector  and" Madam  could  depend  upon  Dame  Spud 
and  her  yeoman  husband  as  being  trustworthy  jailers,  sens- 
ible and  reasonably  kind  people  of  their  rank  ;  while  Madam 
relieved  her  yearning  love,  and  helped  to  defeat  her  own 
purpose,  by  surreptitiously  supplying  the  owners  of  the 
farm  with  a  hundred  comforts  and  delicacies.  These  Milly 
took  sullenly,  without  observation  or  acknowledgment ;  in- 
deed, she  grumbled  loudly  at  the  absence  of  others,  which 
were  not  within  Madam's  power  to  lend  out. 

Grand'mere  all  the  while  looked  askance  at  the  English 
practice  of  forgiveness,  coupled  with  such  an  ordeal. 

"Said  I  not  the  pastor  was  like  Jean  Calvin?  Si  I  but 
such  an  act  as  this  was  not  in  the  politics  of  Jean  Calvin; 
this  is 'from  the  Turk  to  the  Moor.'  Jean  Calvin  locked 
up  a  woman  for  wearing  the  hair  en  boucles,  and  a  man  for 


THE   IIUGUENOT   FAMILY.  321 

reading  romances!  Yes!  but  the  culprits  were  malcon- 
tents ;  they  refused  to  desist ;  it  was  not  without  seeking  to 
bring  them  to  renouuee  their  offenses,  when  the  legislator 
would  have  pardoned  them  as  freely  as  the  summer  wind 
blows  about  the  corn.  Not  a  man  on  earth  was  more  <jen- 
erous  to  a  penitent  than  Calvin.  But  this  English  half-and- 
half  mode,  this  saying,  on  the  right  side, '  Seest  thou,  I 
grant  that  thou  art  risen  and  gone  from  the  post  of  rebel- 
lion, or  that  thou  wishest  well  to  do  so,  and  I  pardon  ;'  and 
on  the  left,  '  It  is  true,  thy  sword  is  thrown  down,  and 
thou  art  at  my  feet,  but  still  I  dare  not  trust  thee  until  I 
punish' — it  answers  not ;  it  serves  only  to  harden  ;  the 
game  is  not  worth  the  candle,  while  simply  to  cancel  the 
debt  might  awaken  compunction  and  win  devotion.  Ah  !  my 
child,  dost  thou  remember  the  beautiful  story  of  the  lord  who 
frankly  forgave  his  servant  all  the  debt  that  he  owed  him? 
This  version  is  as  if  the  lord  had  said,  '  I  frankly  forgave 
the  one-half,  but  for  the  other,  thou  must  bear  the  conse- 
quences, and  I  shall  deal  them  out  in  what  will  seem  like  a 
lurking  grudge  against  thee.'  People  must  be  the  one 
thing  or  the  other — judges  to  condemn,  or  kings  to  confer 
mercy,  and  not  a  part  of  both,  with  both  parts  spoiled  ;  un- 
less, indeed,  it  be  as  the  pastor  preaches,  that  the  broken 
must  be  kept  from  the  whole.  Truly,  that  is  a  solemn 
truth,  which,  the  broken,  who  are  also  broken  in  spirit,  as 
well  as  the  whole,  who  preserve  their  purity  in  meek  fear 
and  trembling,  will  never  deny.  But  God  be  praised,  here 
is  no  question  of  broken,  but  of  a  foolish,  spoiled  child,  happi- 
ly rescued,  in  His  mercy,  from  the  imminent  peril  into  which 
she  had  run." 

At  last  Madam  from  the  rectory  compelled  her  sore 
mother's  heart  to  submit  to  circumstances.  She  lowered 
her  colors,  made  an  errand  to  the  Shottery  Cottage,  and 
sought  a  private  conversation  with  Madame  Dupuy,  mere. 
She  begged  her  to  go  and  see  the  culprit,  comfort  her  in 
the  first  place,  and  remonstrate  with  her  in  the  second. 
"Do,  dear  old  Grand'mere ;  Philip  will  not  be  angry  with 
you  for  going,  you  do  not  come  within  his  forbidden  family. 
I'm  sure  he'd  liefer  you  went  than  stayed.  It  ain't  so  far, 
and  I'll  lend  the  coach  fur  the  ride  any  day.  Think  what  a 
pleasure  it  will  be  for  the  poor  soul  to  see  a  face  she  knows, 
shut  up  as  she  is  yonder  at  Farmer  Spud's  in  the  depth  of 

<)  2 


322  THE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

winter.  If  it  Lad  been  summer,  there  might  have  been 
cowslip-picking,  and  hay-making,  and  '  the  hole,'  and  the 
rustics  might  have  been  better  borne  with,  though  even 
then  my  Milly  had  no  turn  for  country  pleasures,  that  I 
could  ever  find  out,  unless  as  an  excuse  for  junketing  with 
young  people  like  herself.  Oh  me !  to  think  of  what  my  in- 
nocent love  and  darling  hath  come  to — for  she  is  innocent, 
Graud'mere,  of  every  thing  but  willfulness  and  heedlessness, 
and  perhaps  a  spice  of  vanity,  in  going  with  Mr.  George — 
a  villain  to  make  so  light  of  her!  It  seems  just  the  other 
day  that  she  was  such  a  pretty  baby  in  a  robe  and  cap, 
which  I  was  so  proud  to  work  for  her,  though  they  ate  up 
three  months  of  my  precious  time  ;  but  the  rector  did  not 
think  it  wasted,  not  he.  He  said  if  a  bride  Avas  permitted 
to  delight  herself  in  her  jewels,  much  more  a  mother  in 
making  her  child  dainty  by  her  deft  and  patient  fingers,  so 
that  she  did  not  forget  and  neglect  other  poor  children  ;  and 
Philip,  my  brave  little  boy,  wTas  so  fond  of  his  pretty  little 
sister ;  and  now  all  that  is  mortal  of  him  lies  moldering  in 
an  American  wilderness,  and  she  is  sent  away  in  disgrace 
to  Farmer  Spud's.  The  rector  says  Ave  ought  to  praise  God 
that  she  is  in  no  worse  quarters;  but  I  do  not  always  see 
how  that  may  be,  for  I  can  hardly  credit  that  any  Mr. 
George  among  them  could  have  been  monster  enough  to 
harm  Milly  farther  than  by  playing  on  her  fine  spirit,  and 
on  the  giddiness  of  chits  like  her — one  sees  them  grow  sober 
and  steady  enough  before  long — but  few  are  so  good  as  the 
rector.  However,  you  are  not  under  a  good-man's  con- 
trol, my  dear  old  Madame — that  is,  your  worshipful  son, 
though  he  has  come  to  middle  age,  and  may  be  regarded  as 
the  head  of  the  house,  doth  not  seem  ever  to  contradict 
you.  I  do  not  understand  it,  for  I  have  always  been  accus- 
tomed to  men  of  masterful  minds ;  but  by  your  leave  I 
crave  to  take  advantage  of  it,  since  I  do  not  hear  tidings  of 
my  unhappy  girl  from  other  than  Molly  Spud,  who  sees 
nought  but  that  she  ain't  starving  herself  to  death,  and 
don't  sit  up  or  walk  about  of  nights.  That  is  mighty  fine 
news  ;  but,  bless  you,  it  is  not  all,  and  if  I  don't  hear  more, 
I  vow  my  heart-strings  will  crack." 

"A  thousand  times  ;  I  shall  go  this  evening,  or  to-morrow 
morning — when  you  will,"  said  Grand'mere,  with  the  flush 
of  her  abounding  goodness  kindling  up  her  face.     "Yes,  it 


THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  323 

is  true,  my  Hubert  does  not  contradict  me ;  he  trusts  me 
like  that !  It  is  not  good  that  the  hen  should  crow  before 
the  cock,  but  it  is  the  fashion  of  French  sons  to  hang  the 
sword  to  the  crook  where  the  mothers  are  concerned,  and 
when  hard  words  are  spoken  of  menages  de  Paris,  it  is  but 
what  you  call  fair,  Madam,  that  this  mode  of  the  sons  should 
be  remembered  in  their  favor." 

"  And  may  I  come,  Grand'mere  ?"  asked  Yolande,  half 
pleadingly,  half  deprecatingly,  as  the  old  woman  was  pre- 
paring for  her  visit.  "  You  can  not  ride  without  me,  ma 
mere.  Is  it  not  so  ?  You  will  have  ache  of  the  tongue 
with  keeping  it  still  when  you  see  all  the  novelties  of  the 
road  ;  or  you  will  forget,  and  begin  to  talk  like  a  mill  to  the 
crows  and  the  leverets,  and  the  coachman  will  think  you  a 
pecque.  You  know  all  that,  ma  mere  with  the  golden 
mouth,  quite  fine!  Grand'mere,  but  I  will  not  have  it  that 
the  golden  mouth  should  be  mute  as  a  mitaine  on  a  rare 
ride,  or  be  mistaken  for  the  mouth  of  a  poor  senseless  mon- 
ster of  a  folle.  Then  that  poor  Milly,  Grand'mere,  what 
think  you  ?  Will  she  wish  to  see  me  ?  Will  she  think  I 
come  to  triumph  over  her  for  my  superior  wisdom  ?  Will 
she  believe  I  stay  away  to  show  her  my  contempt  ?  Which 
do  you  think  ?" 

"  Plain  pied,  donzelle,  I  believe  it  is  wc  who  will  suffer 
in  the  interview,  and  not  poor  Milly.  The  child  is  not 
wise,  is  no  better  than  she  can  help ;  she  is  not  tender,  nor 
thin-skinned,  save  where  the  question  is  of  her  pride,  her 
will,  her  pleasure.  The  hand  of  man  has  not  humbled  her, 
and,  mark  me,  it  will  need  the  hand  of  God  to  do  that. 
They  speak  much  of  the  hardness,  the  coarseness,  and  the 
spiritual  selfishness  of  the  Pharisee  ;  and  that  is  well.  They 
speak  much  of  the  softness,  the  delicacy,  and  the  unselfish- 
ness  of  the  sinner;  and  I  think  that  is  not  well.  It  is  the 
Israelite  indeed  who  is  mild,  noble,  and  generous,  but  the 
sinner  only  a  little  morsel  more  so  than  the  Pharisee.  Do 
1  not  love  the  sinner  ?  My  God  help  me  !  I  am  a  sinner 
myself — a  great  sinner  for  my  years,  my  opportunities,  my 
lessons.  But  because  I  would  love  the  sinner,  it  is  neces- 
sary that  it  be  for  her  proper  In  any  guts  that  I  see  her 
exactly  as  she  is,  hard,  coarse,  seliish  in  all  ranks,  condi- 
tions, and  degrees  of  sin.  You  will  see.  We  will  visit 
Miss  Milly — you  will  redden  as  the  lire,  and  for  me,  I  shall 


324  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

redden  as  the  turkey-cock  ;  tiens  !  she  will  not  have  more 
pink  than  the  rose.  You  will  weep  like  a  cascade,  and  I 
shall  blow  my  nose,  while  she  will  be  as  dry  as  the  great 
road  on  a  day  in  summer,  and  as  cool  as  a  carrefour  in  one 
of  our  forests,  or  as  the  well  of  St.  Benoite.  You  will  be' 
timid  as  a  wet  hen,  she  will  be  brave  to  the  three  hairs. 
Ah,  well!  she  will  be  a  great  deal  the  sorrier  spectacle,  and 
the  more  to  be  pitied,  if  it  be  with  her  as  it  has  been  or- 
dinarily with  the  sinners  whom  I  have  known  before,  than 
if  she  reddened  and  wept.  Then  she  might  not  need  us, 
and  we  should  only  be  in  the  way  if  she  had  already  opened 
the  door  to  the  great  and  good  guest,  the  Master,  the 
King,  who  had  come  in  to  sup  with  her,  and  her  alone." 

So  Yolande  went  with  Grand'mere  in  the  winter  after- 
noon. They  left  their  coach  on  a  by-road,  which  threaten- 
ed the  younger  with  a  repetition  of  her  overturn,  and  the 
elder  with  a  general  fracture  of  her  bones,  brittle  with  age. 
As  it  was,  there  was  urgent  demand  both  for  Yolande's 
arm  and  the  assistance  of  Madame  Rougeole  before  Grand'- 
mere could  climb  the  rugged  path  from  the  Waiiste,  the 
only  road  to  Corner  Farm,  slippery  with  ice. 

Corner  Farm  was  a  humble  house,  built  of  unhewn  stones, 
with  a  thatch  roof,  and  windows  four  panes  square,  which 
looked  into  a  cattle-shed,  a  sheep-pen,  and  a  pig-sty — a  place 
at  which  a  girl  like  Milly  llolle,  if  she  had  ridden  across  to 
it,  to  call  for  her  old  nurse,  would,  the  moment  Dame 
Spud's  back  had  been  turned,  have  held  up  her  hands  and 
cast  up  her  eyes  in  horror.  At  the  same  time  she  would 
have  exercised  her  lungs  every  time  she  had  crossed  the 
threshold  by  screeching  in  imitation  of  the  plovers  and 
snipes  on  the  Waiiste,  at  every  colt  and  heifer  she  had  en- 
countered, and  she  could  not  have  gone  far  without  meet- 
ing specimens  of  Farmer  Spud's  stock,  in  the  centre  of 
which  he  lived,  like  an  ancient  patriarch  or  a  modern  squat- 
ter. Even  Grand'mere,  who  had  been  accustomed  to 
southern  cottages  in  their  own  luxuriant,  mellow-toned 
home-growth  of  maize,  vines,  gourds,  and  almond-trees, 
shrank  a  little  from  the  bleakness  and  desolation  of  this 
moorland  farm.  As  Madam  at  the  rectory  had  said,  it  might 
in  summer  have  had  some  homely  attractions,  with  the  cow- 
slips and  hay  faintly  struggling  for  existence  among  gorse 
and  heather.     But  in  midwinter  the  Waiiste  was  a  howl- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  325 

ing  wilderness,  and  the  few  cultivated  fields  were  Waastes 
in  their  turn,  while  the  cattle,  sheep,  and  pigs  were  hud- 
dled together  in  the  yard,  foddered  with  rotting  straw  and 
rushes,  and  fed  on  half-gnawed  turnips  and  house  refuse. 
The  steep  road  was  a  miry  trail  of  black  mud,  or  a  succes- 
sion of  jagged  impressions  of  hob-nailed  shoes  as  hard  as 
iron,  like  a  new  class  of  fossils.  Corner  Farm  at  this  season 
was  not  far  from  being  as  bad  as  Siberia  to  a  pampered, 
empty-headed,  and  weak  girl.  Yet  it  was  not  without  its 
substantial  advantages.  It  was  weather-tight,  and  as  clean 
within  as  scrubbing  could  make  it;  and  it  was  held  health- 
ful when  the  breath  of  cattle  was  counted  not  a  poisoner 
but  a  sweetener  of  air.  Farmer  Spud  and  his  wife  were 
well-to-do  people  in  their  line.  There  was  no  want  of  the 
necessaries  of  life,  of  native  wooden  chairs,  stools,  and  bed- 
frames,  checked  draperies  and  coarse  linen,  as  well  as  of 
plenty  of  plaiding  and  carpet  bed-furnishings,  deep  yellow 
and  red  earthenware,  besides  the  surreptitious  and  supple- 
mentary contributions  from  the  rectory.  And  at  that  time, 
many  a  vicarage  and  parsonage  was  not  much  better  sup- 
plied. 

Yolande,  with  Grand'mere  on  her  arm,  knocked  long  and 
loud  at  the  solid  oaken  door,  and  had  plenty  of  time  to  in- 
spect the  stock,  divided  from  them  only  by  hurdles,  and 
sometimes  not  by  that.  Dame  Spud  was  in  the  back  prem-i 
ises,  where  her  clatter  among  pots  and  pans,  and  her  deaf- 
ness, combined  to  prevent  her  hearing  them.  The  visitors, 
however,  could  distinguish  Milly  sitting  opposite  them,  be- 
fore one  of  the  little  windows.  She  remained  like  a  statue, 
without  offering  to  move,  in  order  to  greet  them,  or  to  let 
them  in.  At  last,  Farmer  Spud,  an  elderly  man,  fresh- 
colored  like  a  winter  apple,  and  arrayed  in  a  long  vest  and 
knee-breeches,  issued  from  a  shed.  lie  pulled  his  forelock 
and  said  to  Grand'mere  and  Yolande,  "Ye  be  come  to  see 
the  young  leddy,  and  welcome."  But  to  every  word  they 
answered,  he  said  "Anan,"only  adding  an  assurance  that 
"t'  good  wife  'ud  trade  with  them."  He  then  ushered 
them  into  the  house,  calling  in  lusty  tones,  "Moll,  Moll,  ye 
wench  ;  ye  be  right  down  wanted  by  gentlefolks  of  young 
Madam's  litter."  Molly  appeared  hastily,  with  her  lace 
withered  and  yellow,  in  her  llannel  ho<>d.  She  wiped  her 
hands  on  her  striped  woolen  apron,  and  the  moment  she 


326  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

entered  Miles  went  out,  as  if  he  were  but  a  companion 
weather-cock,  no  longer  wanted  on  the  stage.  Molly,  in 
the  character  of  an  old  nurse  and  confidential  servant,  was 
not  unskilled  in  cautious  reserves  and  judicious  asides. 
She  chose  to  treat  her  former  young  mistress  as  having 
been  in  a  general  way  ailing,  so  as  to  have  had  a  change 
of  scene  resorted  to  by  her  friends,  on  her  behalf,  as  part 
of  her  cure.  All  Molly's  speeches  were  doubles  entendres, 
bearing  apparently  on  Milly's  bodily  health,  but  really  on 
her  mental  mood.  "Mistress  Milly  be  getting  stout  again, 
that  she  be ;  but  Norwich  weren't  built  on  one  day ;  noa, 
noa,  she  will  not  stir  to  the  door  yet — not  to  see  the  milk- 
ing, which  she  were  fond  of  looking  at  as  a  babby — but 
that  will  come  in  time.  She  is  able  to  divert  herself  most 
days  with  her  thread-papers,  as  Madam,  her  mother,  will 
be  mighty  glad  to  learn,  for  the  head  and  the  heart  ain't 
none  of  them  over-bad  when  a  miss  can  settle  to  make 
thread-papers." 

Milly  was  in  the  act  of  making  her  thread-papers — cut- 
ting down  strips  of  gaudy  card-board,  painted  with  staring 
flowers,  birds,  and  butterflies,  and  pasting  them  together 
in  the  requisite  shape.  She  was  even  more  elaborately 
dressed  than  usual.  She  had  long  gloves  and  a  fan  lying 
beside  her,  while  her  slippered  feet  rested  on  a  square  of 
rag  carpet,  and  a  leathern  screen  stood  at  her  back.  She 
rose  and  executed  a  dignified  courtesy — such  a  salut  dejeime 
fllle  as  Grand'mere  had  never  beheld  before — without 
blushing  in  face  or  trembling  in  figure,  and  said  "  Good-day 
to  you,  ladies,"  in  a  confident,  careless  tone. 

Grand'mere  was  excited,  fatigued,  and  ready  to  drop 
into  the  chair  which  Dame  Spud  offered  her.  Yolande  had 
known  so  few  friends  that  she  could  not  forget  this  Milly, 
now  in  a  sort  of  solitary  confinement,  doing  penance  for 
her  delinquency.  But  Milly  seemed  to  have  forgotten  the 
former  friendship,  or  not  to  recognize  that  there  had  been 
happier  times.  She  was  bent  on  putting  a  bold  face  on  mat- 
ters, and  carrying  them  with  a  high  hand,  while  she  did  not 
lend  herself  in  the  least  to  Dame  Spud's  manoeuvre,  but  pro- 
claimed loudly,  with  a  taunt  in  her  accent,  that  she  had  nev- 
er been  bettor  in  her  life,  and  that  she  was  as  strong  as  a  dai- 
ry-maid. She  stared  Grand'mere  and  Yolande  full  in  their 
disturbed,  confused  faces.    She  laughed  and  talked  noisily, 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  327 

though  she  took  care  not  to  drop  a  syllable  which  bore 
upon  the  rector,  Madam,  or  Dolly.  So  far  from  Grand'- 
mere  having  "to  make  conversation  on  the  point  of 
a  needle,"  she  could  barely  get  in  a  word  to  tell  Milly 
how  M.  Landre,  and  many  French  men  and  women,  tint- 
ed thread-papers,  and  made  a  decent  livelihood  by  it. 
Milly  did  not  really  care  for  thread-paper  flowers  and  but- 
terflies, any  more  than  for  the  originals.  The  only  symp- 
tom, if  it  could  be  called  a  symptom,  of  consciousness 
which  she  gave,  was  sundry  little  snarls  and  snaps  at 
the  singleness  of  heart  which  had  rendered  Yolande  her 
dupe,  and  at  the  presence  of  mind  and  intrepidity  which 
had  enabled  Yolande  to  free  herself  from  the  plot  which, 
falling  to  pieces,  had  brought  grief  to  Milly.  "  You  need 
not  be  so  glib  in  giving  your  opinion,  Ma'mselle"  (Yo- 
lande was  not  giving  it);  "you  know  you  can  not  see 
for  your  nose  the  very  road  you  are  traveling.  You  are 
not  so  much  a  girl  of  parts  as  of  prodigious  luck,  when 
you  can  ride  away,  at  a  moment's  notice,  in  the  middle 
of  the  night,  with  young  Squire  Gage,  and  not  a  dog  wag 
its  tail  at  you  for  it." 

Yolande  was  confounded  and  altogether  dispirited  by 
her  visit.  "  Graud'mere,"  she  protested,  the  moment  the 
two  were  in  the  coach,  "  did  you  ever  see  such  a  change  ? 
It  might  have  been  tie  coq-d-Fdne  with  Milly  when  she  was 
simply  young  and  gay,  but  now  it  is  from  brass  to  ada- 
mant." 

"  Until  the  next  time,  my  dear,"  nodded  Grand'inere,  re- 
assuring Yolande.  "  She  is  what  I  expected.  I  have  seen 
characters  much  worse  than  a  poor  foolish  girl  braving  her 
folly  out  without  a  smile  of  the  heart,  but  with  crispations 
of  the  nerves  to  keep  up  the  role  which  she  is  overacting 
furiously.  I  have  seen  a  sinner  comme  Ufaut,  gentiile,  a 
penitent  by  design  and  premeditation,  as  our  women  of 
quality  were  wont  to  wind  all  up,  according  to  rule,  by  be- 
coming, on  a  set  day,  devonee.  Oh,  Yolandctte,  profession 
is  so  abominably  easy — above  all,  when  it  is  to  profit  the 
professor — that  even  the  professor  may  cheat  himself.  I 
say  not,  reject  him;  for  who  art  thou  that  judgest?  But 
shall  thy  heart  tremble  to  its  core  for  a  fellow-mortal? 
Shalt  thou,  if  love  divine  were  not  an  abiding  miracle,  give 
up  such  a  one  in  despair?     Let  it  be  then  when  thou  list- 


328  THE    HUGUESJOT   FAMILY. 

enest  to  an  easy  penitent,  a  fluent  confessor  and  abjurer  of 
his  sins,  a  huge  promiser  of  reformation  !" 

That  visit  was  the  first  of  many  visits  which  Grand'mere 
and  Yolande  paid  to  Milly  during  her  exile  at  the  Corner 
Farm.  For  a  time  there  seemed  no  door  of  the  girl's  heart 
which  was  not  locked  and  barred  against  both  them  and 
her  kindred,  the  more  surely  that  her  own  fault  was  the 
great  bolt  and  barrier.  Her  reception  of  them  was  brava- 
do ;  she  would  not  let  them  come  to  close  quarters  with 
her,  would  not  let  Grand'mere  say  "her  say."  " Ma  jille, 
we  are  all  sorry  and  suffering  in  your  sufferings.  We  all 
forgive  as  we  hope  to  be  forgiven.  Will  you  not  be  recon- 
ciled to  us,  as  we  all  trust  to  be  reconciled  to  God  ?" 
Milly  would  not  let  Yolande  cry,  "Milly,  we  were  happy 
once,  when  we  only  liked  each  other  a  little,  when  we  had 
only  a  little  gayety,  good-humor,  and  girlishness  between 
us.  At  present  we  have  wrong,  strife,  sadness  between  lis. 
Alas !  that  it  should  be  so  !  But  shall  we  not  love  each 
other  much,  and  be  as  happy  as  the  angels,  if  we  put  all 
these  things  away  from  us,  without  asking  any  questions, 
and  be  Milly  and  Yolande  again,  beginning  anew  by  being 
good  girls,  and  helping  each  other  to  be  better  ?" 

In  the  end,  as  Grand'mere  kept  firmly  to  her  resolution 
not  to  preach  until  Milly  would  be  preached  to,  Milly  grad- 
ually dropped  her  mask,  and  showed  herself  wounded,  re- 
sentful, wretched.  She  had  "  run  with  the  footmen,"  and 
they  had  wearied  her,  how  then  could  she  "  contend  with 
the  horses?"  And  if  in  "the  land  of  peace,"  wherein  she 
had  trusted,  they  had  wearied  her,  then  how  would  she  do 
in  "the  swelling  of  Jordan  ?"  Milly  had  sense  to  know 
that  she  had  made  the  change  in  her  lot  for  herself;  and 
that  she  had  been  restless  and  discontented  even  when  she 
was  a  petted  child,  a  flattered  young  mistress,  with  Dolly 
for  a  companion  princess,  and  Madam  their  mother  for  their 
first  subject,  with  fair  prospects  and  a  fine  prince  to  be  met, 
either  at  the  castle  or  at  the  Holies'  town  house,  for  her 
portion  in  the  future.  Now  she  was  sent  away  from  home 
to  a  miserable  hovel,  as  Milly  in  her  indignation  called 
Corner  Farm,  with  no  company  save  a  goodman  and  his 
wile.  Nobody  came  near  her  except  the  French  family, 
whom  she  had  cheated,  but  who  had  got  the  better  of  her 
at  last.     Her  fair  prospects  were  spoiled,  her  fine  prince 


TIIE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  329 

■would  not  have  a  gift  of  her — rather  had  ridden  away,  and 
dismissed  her  with  scant  ceremony  after  she  had  served  his 
whim.  And  she  had  brought  all  her  reverses  upon  herself. 
Her  papa  might  never  receive  her  at  home  again,  or  if  he 
did,  she  might  not  be  taken  out  into  co.inpany,  so  that  his 
reception  would  not  signify  very  much.  She  could  not  run 
off  .any  more,  for  the  very  good  reason  that  she  had  nobody 
to  run  off  with ;  neither  was  she  a  good  hand  to  plan  and 
carry  througluan  elopement.  Mr.  George  had  managed  it 
all  before,  and  her  friends  "had  taken  good  care  that  she 
should  not  have  so  much  as  half  a  guinea  to  keep  her  pocket 
with." 

Milly  tossed  her  thread-papers  into  the  fire,  and  sat 
twirling  her  thumbs  in  dire  monotonous  gloom,  like  any 
helpless  doting  old  man  or  woman,  until  Grand'mere  began 
to  fear  for  her  reason,  and  set  Dame  Spud  and  her  good- 
man  to  watch  their  charge  by  turns  night  and  day,  because 
of  those  dismal  tragedies  of  horse-ponds  and  trees,  and  ly- 
ing down  to  sleep  the  last  sleep  in  solitudes  like  the 
Waiiste,  which  were  then  often  enough  heard  of. 

One  day,  as  Grand'mere  was  parting  from  Milly,  she 
cried  for  a  boon,  though  it  was  only  that  her  little  dog 
Pickle  might  come  to  her.  "  He  will  not  think  shame  of 
me  :  I  have  not  hurt  him.  Let  me  have  something  near 
me  that  I  used  to  care  for,  and  that  cared  for  me,  before 
my  friends  gave  me  up." 

So  Pickle  was  sent  to  her ;  and  Milly  fondled  and  spoke 
to  the  little  creature  as  he  crept  into  her  lap,  licked  her 
hands,  and  whined  with  joy  for  the  re-union  ;  and  every 
sight  and  touch  of  him  did  her  good.  "  Only  a  silly  little 
dog,"  Molly  often  heard  her  murmur ;  "  it  knows  no  bet- 
ter ;  it  is  no  wiser  than  I — to  reproach,  despise,  shun,  and 
forget  me.  It  is  mighty  fine,  but  mighty  foolish  of  you, 
Pickle,  to  behave  so  very  genteelly  to  your  old  mistress, 
who  has  lost  her  title  even  to  a  little  wretch  of  a  lap-dog's 
regard. 

The  next  time  Grand'mere  came  Milly  flung  herself  on 
the  old  woman's  shoulder,  and  opened  the  very  llood-gates 
of  her  heart. 

"Oh!  Grand'mere,  why  am  I  punished  so  much  more 
than  other  girls  who  have  behaved  no  better  than  I?" 

"  You  find  ?     How  bitter  that  is!"  sympathized  Grand'- 


330  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

more,  with  the  utmost  compassion.  "  My  child,  it  is  not 
the  being  more  punished,  it  is  not  that  you  have  not  done 
worse  than  other  girls ;  life  was  wrong  before  you  commit- 
ted this  trespass,  these  ten,  twenty  years,  since  you  were 
born.  You  have  not  been  a  happy  girl,  Milly — not  so  hap- 
py as  you  might  have  been — not  so  happy  as  my  Yolande, 
aud  she  is  an  exile  like  myself;  and  we  have  our  cares  and 
troubles — yes,  indeed,  our  cares  and  troubles.  You  could 
not  die  to-morrow,  and  say  farewell  to  the  world  in  peace, 
as  Yolande  could." 

"I  wish  I  could.  Oh!  mercy!  Grand'inere,  I  almost 
wish  I  could." 

"But  no,  you  can  not,  unless  you  say,  This  suffices. 
What  am  I  but  a  poor,  ignorant,  sinful  girl  ?  And  it  is 
not  that  I  have  not  sinned  to  be  punished,  but  that  I  have 
done  nothing  save  sin  since  I  came  into  the  world,  and  de- 
serve nothing  save  punishment  at  Thy  hands.  Mon  Dieti, 
is  this  the  reason  why  our  Lord  and  Saviour  did  and  suffer- 
ed Thy  will  ?  If  I  believe  that,  I  shall  have  a  load  lifted 
from  my  heart — I  shall  bow  down  in  adoration — I  shall 
look  up  and  smile  aud  sing.  More  than  that,  I  shall  say, 
'  Thy  will  be  done  for  all  my  small  suffering.'  More  than 
that,  I  shall  say,  '  Lord,  with  the  help  of  Thy  Holy  Spirit, 
I,  even  I,  who  have  lived  for  nothing  but  myself  and  vani- 
ty, and  the  flesh  and  the  devil,  I  shall  do  Thy  will.'  " 

"  Oh,  Grand'mere,  I  will  try.  I  have  done  with  myself; 
I  am  sick  of  serving  myself.  If  I  sought  to  serve  another, 
and  that  other — oh,  Grand'mere  ! — God  himself — would 
lie  help  me?  would  He  do  it  for  Christ's  sake,  who  died 
for  sinners  ?  I  have  not  to  be  taught  that,  Grand'mere. 
Sure,  I  am  a  Christian,  and  my  papa  is  a  good  clergyman  ; 
but  I  want  something  to  make  me  free  to  live  and  die  a 
life  and  death  worth  having.  "Will  you  teach  me,  Grand'- 
mere ?  You  shake  your  head.  Yolande,  then  ;  though 
she  can  not  be  so  wise  as  you  ?     No  !     "Who  ?" 

"  God  himself  will  teach  his  silly,  wayward,  sinful  child  ; 
He  will  lead  her,  and  bear  with  her.  Christ  will  carry  her 
case  before  the  throne,  as  He  carried  her  offenses  in  His 
body  on  the  tree.  The  Holy  Spirit  will  come  down  and 
dwell  with  her,  and  make  her  frail  body  the  temple  of  the 
Holy  Ghost;  and  all  if  Milly  Rolle  will  only  ask  for  it. 
Milly  may  have  heaven  from  God  for  the  asking." 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  331 


CHAPTER  XXX. 

"  STONE  WALLS  DO  NOT  A  PRISON  MAKE." 

Milly  had  opened  her  heart  to  a  new  influence,  very 
different  from  any  that  had  been  in  it  before.  And  this 
influence  worked  like  all  other  influences  which  are  of  God, 
whether  it  be  the  quickening  and  growth  of  a  seed  of  grain, 
or  the  call  and  obedience  of  a  human  heart.  In  the  case 
of  Milly  Rolle  there  was  not  the  same  striking  outward 
manifestation  of  grace  as  in  the  case  of  the  rough  livers  of 
Sedge  Pond.  Their  conversion  took  place  at  a  great  crisis 
— a  time  of  trial  and  refreshing ;  and  so  their  transforma- 
tion from  brutal  indulgences  and  the  brutal  expression  of 
foul  thoughts  to  something  higher  and  purer  was  very  ap- 
parent. They  were  men  and  women  existing  in  the  primi- 
tive state  and  of  the  primitive  stuff"  which  melts  like  the 
rock  before  the  fire,  and,  cleansed  as  by  fire,  comes  out  of 
the  furnace  strangely  clean  and  soft,  and  pours  itself  out  in 
floods  of  elevation  and  ecstacies  of  thanksgiving.  The  con- 
version of  Milly  Rolle  from  self-will  to  God,  from  frivolous 
worldliness  to  spending  her  life  for  her  Father  and  her 
brethren,  was  as  real,  but  it  could  not  in  the  nature  of 
things  be  so  conspicuous  or  so  demonstrative.  She  was 
conscious  of  her  want,  nay,  more,  she  was  contrite  for  her 
waste,  and  she  earnestly  wished  and  hoped  to  do  better. 
She  believed  with  all  her  heart  that  one  reason  why  the 
Lord  and  Saviour  of  men  had  died,  was  simply  to  bear  her 
penalty,  and  to  enable  her  to  do  better.  And  all  this  be- 
cause God's  love  had  shone  upon  her  in  her  desolation,  and 
shown  her  how  good,  wise,  and  tender  He  was,  and  how 
bad,  foolish,  and  regardless  of  Him  she  had  been.  There- 
fore she  came  to  Him  now,  and  cried  unto  Him,  because 
He  was  her  earliest,  her  latest  Friend,  her  Creator  and  her 
Father,  the  beginning  of  her  life  and  the  end  of  her  being. 

But  with  all  these  faint  quiverings  and  pulsations  of  a 
new  life  beyond  herself  and  yel  within  herself,  Milly  was 
the  old  Milly  still.     She  was  still  weak,  and  not  over  wise, 


332  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

and  encumbered  with  old  ignorances  and  affectations, 
which  had  become  a  second  nature  to  her.  She  began  to 
be  sorry,  and  in  her  sorrow  to  have  some  hope,  faith,  and 
charity.  She  began  to  pray,  and  to  feel  inclined  to  ask 
her  father's  and  mother's  forgiveness  in  place  of  refusing 
to  forgive  them.  She  was  even  inclined  to  be  a  little  grate- 
ful to  Farmer  Spud  and  his  dame,  .for  their  cordial  good- 
will and  assiduous  services,  as  well  as  to  be  kind  to  Grand'- 
mere  and  Yolande,  and  glad  to  welcome  them  to  Corner 
Farm.  And  she  gave  the  best  proof  of  all  by  taking  Grand'- 
mere's  advice,  and  trying  to  work  a  little,  and  to  be  inter- 
ested in  her  work,  whether  it  were  at  thread-papers  or 
helping  Molly  with  her  coarse  patching  and  darning.  She 
took  some  pleasure  in  praying,  and  in  going  through  a 
chapter  of  the  Bible. 

But  it  is  the.  will  of  God  to  rear  and  train  men  and 
women,  as  he  rears  and  trains  animals  and  plants,  by  slow 
degrees  and  by  successive  stages.  The  Corner  Farm  life 
was  still  the  extreme  of  dullness  and  mortification  to  Milly 
Rolle.  She  could  not  help  moping  and  writhing,  though  now 
only  at  intervals,  and  not  without  calling  herself  to  account 
for  it,  and  struggling  against  it.  The  rector  was  a  tena- 
cious man,  who  patiently  carried  out  his  purposes,  and  ex- 
acted from  himself  every  jot  and  tittle  of  their  fulfillment, 
else  he  would  have  put  an  end  to  Milly's  probation  on  the 
first  symptom  of  her  amendment.  As  it  was,  he  kept  her 
at  the  Corner  Farm  till  the  expiry  of  the  term  which  he 
had  fixed  upon  for  her  banishment,  and  till  the  scandal  of 
her  running  away  had  blown  over  in  the  parish  and  neigh- 
borhood, lie  did  not  trust  himself  to  go  near  her,  lest  he 
should  be  overcome.'  lie  only  relaxed  so  far  as  to  allow 
Dolly  to  go  to  her  sister.  Dolly  stared  shyly  at  first,  and 
then  sat  hand  in  hand  with  Milly  longer  than  they  had  ever 
sat  before.  Then  the  culprit  had  interviews  with  Madam, 
when  she  ran  into  her  mother's  arms  and  lay  there.  Mr. 
Iloadley,  in  his  new  life  of  a  devoted  priest  caring  for  all 
his  flock,  overlooked  not  this  young  member  who  had  stum- 
bled  and  gone  out  of  the  way,  whose  knees  were  feeble, 
ami  whose  hands  hung  down.  Nor  was  he  interdicted  in 
hi-  ministry  when  he  solemnly  asked  the  rector's  permis- 
sion to  exercise  it  upon  the  wanderer.  At  first  she  shrank 
from  Mr.  Iloadley's  counsel  as  being  a  fresh  humiliation, 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  333 

but  afterward  she  thought  better  of  it,  and  not  only  ac- 
cepted it  as  a  part  of  her  penalty,  but,  recognizing  by  a 
new  instinct  the  young  man's  sincerity,  she  was  affected 
and  encouraged  by  her  old  companion's  teaching. 

But  Milly  Rolle  had  great  natural  disqualifications,  com- 
pared with  Yolande  Dupuy,  for  profiting  by  such  an  expe- 
rience  as  that   of  Corner  Farm.     Yolande  was  profound, 
and  Milly  shallow ;  Yolande  was  refined,  and  Milly  rude ; 
Yolande  was  reserved,  and  Milly  accessible.     Yet  for  all 
that,  Yolande  would  have  been  at  home  in  an  English  Si- 
beria, and  would  have  found  a  thousand  objects  of  interest 
and  observation   a  life-time  before  Milly  Rolle.     Yolande 
would  have  learned  to  talk  to  Dame  Spud  and  her  good 
man,  and  discovered  topics   in   common  with  them.     She 
would  have  made  herself  acquainted  with  the  local  names 
and  the  rural  annals — with  all  the  bad  snow-storms,  floods, 
and  blights,  and  the   lives  lost  in  the  Waaste.     And  this 
she  would  have  done  even  though  the  northern  side  of  it 
had  not  "  marched"  with  the  farms  of  the  Mall,  and  the 
Mall  itself  had  not  been  "  most  Waaste"  in  Farmer  Spud's 
grandfather's  day.     In  return  Yolande  would  have  given 
Grand'mere's  ample  chronicle  of  all  the  country  eras  of 
vine  crops  and  silk-worms.     She  would  have  made  friends 
with  the  whole  stock  at  Corner  Farm,  till  the  great  mild 
Juno  eyes  of  the  oxen  would  have  looked  into  hers  with 
a  familiar  greeting,  and   the  plaintive  bleat   of  the  sheep 
would  have  become  an  appeal  for  sympathy,  instead  of  an 
utterance  of  terror.     She  would  have  gone  wild  to  coax  the 
Norfolk  hawk'  from  the  "  holt"  of  ash  and  alder,  the  bittern 
from  the  "  lode,"  the   gulls   and   terns  from  the  nearest 
"  broad."     She  could  no  more  have  confined  her  regards 
to  a  dog  with  a  silver  spoon  in  its  mouth,  like  Fickle,  than 
Monsieur  Landre  and  Caleb  Gage  could  have  limited  theirs. 
So  when  Yolande  came  at  last  to  lighten  a  heavy  week  of 
Milly's  enforced  seclusion,  safe  in  the  surveillance  of  hum- 
ble friends  like  the  Spuds,  and  when  the  freedom  and  good- 
will of  girlish    intercourse — more    in    earnest    and   better 
worth  now — were   fully  restored  between    them,  she   be- 
came cognizant  of  a  hundred  novelties  in  the  homely  lonely 
farm-house,  and  a  hundred  attractions  and  delights  for  her 
there. 

She  began  with  helping  In  break  the  icicles  that  hung 


334  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

from  the  low  eaves  and  the  water-trough,  which  stood  in 
the  centre  of  the  yard  like  the  fountain  in  the  centre  of  a 
French  village  ;  and  when  she  got  a  lesson  from  Dame  Spud 
in  milking  her  favorite  cow,  her  lessons  did  not  end  with* 
that.  She  was  annoyed  at  Milly's  apathy,  and  tried  to 
rouse  her  mind  to  the  solaces  and  gratifications  to  which 
she  was  both  blind  aud  deaf. 

"My  child,"  remonstrated  Yolande,  "I  do  not  hate  this 
place,  oh  pa  !  not  at  all.  I  should  love  it  if  Grand'mere 
were  but  here,  and  spring  and  summer  come  again,  with  the 
calves  and  the  lambs,  the  cry  of  the  lapwing,  and  the  bud- 
ding of  the  sallow.  As  it  is,  I  kiss  my  hand  to  all  the  grave, 
sober,  grown-up  company  of  steers  and  heifers,  rams  and 
ewes.  I  make  love  to  Jacques  the  house-dog,  my  gallant, 
who  would  not  think  twice  of  eating  me  up,  if  he  did  not 
know  my  halting  French  tongue  and  my  grey  French  face. 
I  cajole  Mother  Spud  into  giving  me  grain  for  the  starving 
little  beggars  of  wheat-ears  and  titmice.  But  I  can  not 
feed  the  great  sea-eagle — only,  I  think  of  it,"  broke  off  Yo- 
lande, in  excitement,  "he  comes  as  far  as  the  "Waaste  in 
hard  seasons.  Without  a  doubt  I  must  write  a  poulet — a 
little  chicken  of  a  note — to  my  dear  Monsieur  Landre,  that 
he  may  come  here  next  summer." 

"  But  who  is  this  Mr.  Landre  of  whom  you  talk  so  often  ?" 
asked  Milly,  her  curiosity  stirred. 

"Don't  you  know  Monsieur  Landre?  Ah!  to  be  sure 
you  do  not  know  him,"  answered  Yolande.  "He  is  ravish- 
ing, that  man  ;  he  has  ferocious  merits :  he  is  as  old  as 
Grand'mere,  and  he  was  at  the  galleys  for  the  faith,  only 
think  of  it !  and  he  has  survived  the  awful  galleys  !  Seest 
thou,  Milly  ?  It  is  not  all  bad  here.  Try  it  for  yourself, 
my  life." 

"  Never,  Yolande,"  protested  Milly  gloomily  ;  "  I  could 
never  be  content  with  so  wretched  an  abode  and  such  low 
diversions  when  my  papa  is  a  clergyman  of  the  rank  of  a 
rector.  I  have  been  brought  up  so  differently,  Avith  every 
tiling  handsome  and  genteel  about  me.  My  goodness! 
Ma'raselle,  don't  you  know  that  we  have  fourteen  rooms  in 
the  rectory,  besides  a  china-closet  and  a  still-room,  and  that 
there  are  not  such  peach  wails  and  holly  hedges  for  ten 
miles,  out  of  the  castle  gardens,  as  we  have  ?  And  you  bid 
me   be  comfortable  in  a  pig-sty !     Not   that   Molly   ain't 


THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILV.  335 

cleanly,"  Milly  quickly  corrected  herself;  ';my  mamma 
made  her  that,  but  this  is  like  a  pig-sty  to  what  I  have 
been  accustomed  to ;  yet  you  call  on  me  to  admire  when 
summer  comes.  Summer  is  not  here  ;"  and  here  Milly  inter- 
rupted herself  again  to  moralize :  "  Summer  is  six  months 
away — who  knows  what  may  happen  before  summer  comes ! 
But  though  summer  were  here,  what  have  I  to  admire  but 
a  herd  of  wild  cattle  frightening  me  out  of  my  wits,  a  half- 
reclaimed  field  or  two  with  ugly  roots  and  bad  herbs  stick- 
ing through  the  grass  and  the  corn,  and  the  coarse  weeds 
of  the  black  and  brown  Waaste,  which  my  papa  says  is  the 
reproach  of  the  country  ?." 

"Eh  bien,  Milly,  there  are  some  things  for  which  I  love 
the  lande  more  than  either  your  garden  or  ours ;  I  should 
be  a  suspicion  sorry  if  it  were  all  broken  up  and  cultivated 
to-morrow,  though  I  should  be  bite  if  I  were  so.  It  is  so  fresh, 
as  if  it  had  just  come  direct  from  God's  hands,  and  were 
given  to  the  wild  creatures  which  He  feeds,  and  no  man 
tames.  When  man  needs  it  indeed,  good !  let  him  take  it 
and  conquer  it ;  the  world  was  made  for  man,  and  he  is 
right  to  exercise  his  dominion  over  it,  and  to  rejoice  in  his  do- 
minion. But  until  then,  is  it  not  also  good  that  there  should 
be  No  Man's  Land,  where  all  men,  rich  and  poor  alike,  are 
free  to  go  out  in  the  cool  of  the  day,  and  to  walk,  each  by 
himself,  with  God  ?  It  is  thus  in  the  depths  of  our  forests, 
which  I  never  saw,  and  on  the  heights  of  the  everlasting 
mountains." 

Milly  yawned.  "  I  can  not  understand  you,  Yolaude  ; 
you  are  such  a  strange  girl,"  she  added,  amending  her  con- 
fession with  dignity;  "sure,  savage  forests  and  mountains 
must  be  horrible  and  shocking;  and  no  civilized  being  in 
her  senses  would  go  near  them  if  she  could  help  it,  to  be  de- 
voured by  she-bears  and  hooded  crows.  I'll  tell  you  what 
I  admire — the  castle  park  and  the  gardens,  and  the  town 
meadows  at  Reedham,  where  some  of  the  townspeople  who 
have  their  gardens  in  that  direction  have  laid  out  bowers 
and  summer-houses  and  hermitages  and  grottoes,  with  for- 
eign shrubs,  and  artificial  rocks  and  shell-work  ;  and  they 
have  the  water  diverted  from  the  river  into  mimic  cascades 
and  sweet  little  lakes.  All  that  is  mighty  fine,  and  I  affect 
it,  for  I  am  a  person  of  taste;  but  I  am  like  my  lady. 
Ma'msellc,  who  says  she  can  only  admire  nature  orni,  not 


33G  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

nature  in  dishabille,  with  her  hair  in  curl-papers.  I  believe 
it  is  the  polite  sentiment  of  the  day  ;  and  therefore  it  is  no 
wonder,  and  nobody  can  blame  you,  that  you  are  not  up 
to  it.  After  all,  it  don't  matter,  when  we  are  vile  sinners, 
and  at  the  worst  get  much  better  than  we  deserve.  If  we 
were  like  the  angels,  Ave  would  not,  as  Mr.  Hoadley 
tells  us,  look  about  for  lilies  and  gillyflowers  to  wTaste  our 
precious  time  upon  them,  but  see  a  world  lying  in  wicked- 
ness, and  make  haste  to  escape,  like  Lot  out  of  Sodom,  and 
draw  our  neighbors  after  us,  as  brands  snatched  from  the 
burning." 

"  For  me,  I  do  not  think  the  angels  refuse  to  look  on  the 
works  of  God,"  replied  Yolande,  musingly.  "  Why,  Milly, 
they  are  the  very  sons  of  God  who  shouted  aloud  for  joy 
when  the  great  frame-work  of  the  world  was  complete.  And 
the  fiercest  of  His  creatures  also  praise  Him — hail,  snow,  and 
vapor,  and  stormy  wind  fulfilling  His  word.  How  much 
more,  then,  the  still,  small  lilies  breathing  only  purity  and 
peace,  which  the  Master  himself  bade  us  consider.  Mon- 
sieur Hoadley  does  wrong,  great  wrong,  in  slandering  and 
denouncing  God's  flowers  and  God's  world." 

Milly  drew  back  offended.  "  Yon  must  be  very  wise, 
Yolande,  to  know  better  than  your  teachers.  Much  good 
the  silly,  senseless  flowers  ever  did  a  vain,  worldly  girl  like 
me!" 

"  Pardon  me  Milly,"  begged  Yolande,  quickly,  "  I  did  not 
mean  to  judge  the  pastor.  I  have  known  other  teachers — 
Grand'mere,  old  Monsieur  Landre,  and  others — who  thought 
quite  otherwise,  and  who  loved  the  world,  as  being  a  slop 
to  God's  throne,  and  all  its  creatures  as  His  subjects.  The 
most  of  them  are  more  loyal  and  more  faithful  than  we  are. 
But  I  did  not  mean  that  they  spoke  to  all  alike,  or  that  all 
could  hear  God's  voice  and  see  God's  face  in  them ;  and 
where  that  is  wanting,  that  desperate  word  vanity  is  Avrit- 
ten  on  them  all — silly,  senseless  flowers,  as  you  call  them, 
greedy  or  cruel  animals,  fit  only  for  the  bouquet,  the  child's 
lap,  the  essence-vat,  the  game-bag,  or  to  serve  as  a  meal  for 
your  hooded  crow.  But,  Milly,  even  then,  the  fault  is  in 
the  eyes,  and  not  in  the  flowers  and  the  animals." 

"  Ah,  there,  you  are  at  your  flights   again,  Ma'mselle. 

I 'lion  my  word,  you  require  taking  down;  and  here  conies 

1  Mr.  Hoadley  on  our  mare  Blackberry,  just  in  the  nick 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  337 

of  time  to  do  it,  and  to  put  us  on  some  more  improving  dis- 


course." 


And  Mr.  Hoadley  it  was,  who  had  ridden  through  the 
sludge  and  the  chill  of  midwinter  to  study  the  spiritual 
condition  which  he  was  interested  in,  and  to  do  his  best  to 
rouse  still  farther  from  its  hardening  slough  of  selfishness,  fri- 
volity, and  impenitence  the  soul  of  his  rector's  stray  daughter, 
who  was  come  to  a  sense  of  her  error.  He  went  about  his 
business  the  more  ardently  that  he  had  himself  been  a  sinner 
of  the  same  order,  with  less  excuse  and  with  greater  con- 
demnation, for  he  had  not  merely  higher  faculties,  but  he 
had  received  a  commission,  and  been  consecrated  a  priest. 
He  had  neglected  his  commission,  and  well-nigh  forgotten 
his  consecration ;  but  he  was  in  earnest  at  last  to  bid  Milly 
enter  with  him  and  all  the  other  wrorkers  into  the  vineyard, 
and  to  work  manfully  and  womanfully  for  what  remained 
of  the  day,  till  each  should  receive  the  penny,  the  common 
token  of  the  Master's  gracious  acknowledgment  of  repent- 
ance and  obedience,  whether  late  or  early. 

Full  of  his  purpose,  which  was  noble,  Mr.  Hoadley  came 
and  sat  with  the  girls  in  Dame  Spud's  kitchen.  He  missed 
none  of  the  accessories  which  in  other  circumstances  he 
would  have  been  inclined  to  overvalue  as  much  as  Milly. 
He  had  brushed  aside  whatever  detained  him  in  his  new 
line  of  action — the  poetasting  and  the  mooning  of  those 
years  which  he  had  lived  to  plainly  term  his  unregenerate 
days.  He  treated  the  tastes  which  had  then  occupied  him 
as  petty,  irrelevant  trifles,  if  not  as  insidious  snares. 

To  Mr.  Hoadley  was  propounded  the  question  in  dispute : 
"  Sir,  will  you  tell  us  if  you  think  immortal  souls  are  war- 
ranted in  being  engaged — not  to  say  engrossed — with  mor- 
tal things,  and  not  only  with  fine  furniture  and  fine  clothes, 
savory  food,  such  as  friar's  chicken  and  cherry  pie,  but 
with  posies  and  garden-knots,  and  such  poor  tiny  creatures 
as  wagtails  and  bumblebees  V  for  Ma'mselle  here  and  some 
of  her  friends  pass  over  none  of  these,  which  also,  good 
lack!  perish  in  the  using/' 

With  bis  own  evil  experience  staring  him  full  in  the  face, 
Mr.  Hoadley  could  give  no  other  answer  than  the  impassion- 
ed decree,  "As  for  your  word  '  warrant,'  Madam,  I  can  nol 
reply  to  it.  But  I  dare  to  say,  as  the  creature  i<  subjecl  to 
vanity — the  poor  verses,  lor  example,  in   which  I  used  to 


338  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

dabble,  thinking  it  no  shame  to  waste  more  time  on  polish- 
ing their  prettinesses  than  might  have  served  to  preach  a 
couple  of  sermons  in  different  villages,  ten  miles  apart — I 
am  of  the  mind,  with  regard  to  belles-lettres,  pictures, 
pieces  of  statuary,  and  profane  music,  that  since  they  may 
become  such  stumbling-blocks  to  half-crazy  fools  who  hanker 
after  them,  they  .had  better  be  curbed,  clipped,  and  kept  in 
their  own  places,  and  these  very  poor  places  too,  or  else  re- 
jected altogether  along  with  the  vile  horses  and  cards  on 
which  madmen  lay  their  lives  and  their  deaths." 

"  Do  you  hear  that,  Ma'mselle  ?  Ain't  you  floored  ?" 
cried  Milly,  triumphantly. 

But  Yolande,  though  she  did  not  argue  with  Mr.  Hoadley, 
said  to  herself  in  her  French  fashion,  "IPimporte,  Yolande ; 
never  mind,  my  child.  Judge  not  by  appearances,  but 
judge  righteous  judgment — but  when  will  men,  even  the 
best  of  them,  do  that  ?  Ah  !  when  will  they  not  judge  by 
what  is  expedient,  judicious,  convenable  —  by  how  men 
will  judge  of  them,  and  whether  or  not  their  followers  will 
be  offended  ?  As  if  the  Lord  did  not  offend  his  followers, 
and  many  of  them  walked  no  more  with  Him  ;  but  lie  did 
not  on  that  account  humor  and  cheat  their  prejudices.  No, 
no.  Why  will  they  fear  the  truth,  the  whole  truth-,  and 
nothing  but  the  truth,  as  these  English  say,  when  God  is 
true,  and  loves  truth  on  the  lip  as  well  as  in  the  inner  man  ? 
The  abuse  of  a  matter  is  not  to  rule  the  use,  even  in  horses 
and  cards.  That  is  the  righteous  judgment — I  am  certain 
of  it.  And  as  to  the  least  little  plant — the  hyssop  that 
sprmgeth  from  the  Avail,  and  the  midges  of  animals — these 
are  among  the  little  ones  whom  we  are  not  to  offend,  and 
who  are  sent  to  us  to  teach  us  and  make  us  better,  if  we 
will  only  learn  and  grow  good.  I  know  that,  and  am  cer- 
tain of  it  also." 

Nevertheless  Yolande  was  pleased  when  Mr.  Hoadley, 
with  an  inspiration  which  carried  him  far  beyond  his  old, 
affected,  fractious  self,  told  the  girls  of  what  he  was  doing 
among  the  vice,  misery,  and  inconceivable  ignorance  of 
Sedge  Pond.  He  craved  their  sympathy  for  the  poor  wom- 
an, over  whose  heavy  wooden  cradle,  which  held  her  twin 
ten-days-old  children,  her  husband  and  her  eldest  son  had 
fought  and  fallen  at  the  christening  feast,  kicking  over  the 
••radio  in  their  struggle,  and  casting  one  child  beneath  their 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  339 

feet,  where  its  spark  of  light  was  stamped  out  before  the  reel- 
ing, raging,  unconscious  murderers  could  be  dragged  off  its 
small  body,  and  injuring  the  other  so  heavily  that  there  was 
great  danger  of  its  growing  up  a  helpless  cripple.  And  he  so- 
licited their  solace  for  the  patriarch  of  the  village,  a  hoary 
old  man  of  ninety,  whose  children,  past  the  vigor  but  not 
past  the  lusts  of  life,  were  so  full  of  their  own  riots  and 
bawls,  that  they  elbowed  aside  and  forgot  the  gaunt  relic  of 
the  past,  and  savagely  taunted  and  mocked  him  when  they 
were  reminded  of  him. 

Yolande  thought  it  was  good  to  see  Milly's  blue  saucer 
eyes  grow  deeper  and  darker,  and  fill  with  tears  at  such  re- 
citals, while  she  nervously  stroked  Pickle's  white  curls,  and 
looked  into  the  dog's  liquid  eyes.  She  also  thought  it  was 
good  when  Mr.  Hoadley  read  to  them  from  Christiana's 
progress  in  the  great  pilgrimage,  and  Milly,  who  had  never 
really  cared  for  or  comprehended  a  reading  higher  or  nearer 
to  her  than  the  dry  bones  of  history,  a  mock  pastoral,  a  lan- 
guishing or  farcical  song,  or  the  broadsheet  confession  of  a 
hanged  highwayman,  had  new  faculties  aroused  within  her 
while  she  listened  breathlessly  to  such  difficulties  and  strug- 
gles as  had  till  now  fallen  flat  on  deaf  ears  and  a  deaf  heart. 
She  was  greatly  impressed  and  edified  when  Mr.  Hoad- 
ley's  explanation  and  application  proved  the  struggles 
to  be  her  very  own,  and  was  so  full  of  Christiana  as 
the  representative  of  herself,  of  Madam,  of  Dolly,  of  Yolande, 
and  of  every  woman  she  had  ever  known,  that  she  ceased 
to  see  her  present  wounded,  disgraced  self,  or  Pickle,  or  Yo- 
lande, or  Mr.  Hoadley,  or  the  Spuds'  far-m,  but  hung  alone 
on  the  dream  and  its  interpretation. 

Yolande  called  the  scenes  with  Mr.  Hoadley  good,  though 
she  was  a  little  shy  of  her  own  share  of  his  visits  to  the  Cor- 
ner Farm,  until  she  received  a  smart  lesson,  teaching  her 
that  a  long  memory  is  not  always  an  advantage,  and  that 
girlish  vanity  is  the  height  of  folly.  When  she  returned  to 
Grand'mere,  Yolande  made  a  strange  request.  "Beat 
me, ma  m&re,  before  it  be  too  late,"  she  demanded  val- 
iantly, 

"And  why  should  I  beat  you  at  this  stroke  of  the  dock, 
petite  ?"  answered  Grand'mere,  with  twinkling  i  j 

"  To  beat  the  naughtiness  and  giddiness  out  of  me,  <  irand'- 
niere,"  asserted  Yolande,  shaking  her  head. 


340  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

"  That  would  require  so  thick  a  stick  that  I  could  not  wield 
it ;  I  leave  that  till  I  marry  thee,  Yolandette,  when  I  trust, 
from  thy  own  tale,  that  thy  husband  may  have  a  stouter  arm. 
But  what  is  the  tale,  fifille  fn 

"  Well,  Grand'mere,  I  have  great  shame  of  it ;  for  my 
scornfulness  is  too  bad  when  the  young  pastor  is  so  good 
now,  and  when  Milly  is  a  changed  girl,  as  sober  and  earnest 
as  a  judge  in  her  affair,  and  her  affair  is  repentance  and  be- 
ginning life  anew  like  a  ransomed,  dutiful  child.  How 
should  I  sit  in  the  seat  of  the  scorner,  Grand'mere,  besides 
being  ttte  montee,  to  think  that  Monsieur  Hoadley  likes  to 
look  at  Milly  to-day,  as  well  as  to  lecture  her!  He  has 
thought  over  her  history  till  he  has  taken  it  to  himself,  and 
can  not  separate  it  from  his  own,  and  dreams  and  knows  not 
what  will  be  the  next  chapter,  until  he  forgets  what  he  was 
going  to  say,  and  is  on  the  eve  of  saying  something  to  Milly 
in  quite  a  different  role.  For  Milly,  she  knows  only  that 
Monsieur,  at  whom  she  was  wont  to  laugh  for  his  Methodism, 
has  too  much  goodness,  wisdom,  and  kindness  for  her  ;  and 
the  more  of  kindness  he  has,  the  more  of  contrition  andbro- 
kenness  of  heart  has  Milly. 

"  Go,  Yolande  !"  cried  Grand'mere,  as  she  waved  off  the 
announcement,  incredulous,  and  even  a  little  indignant,  and 
altogether  unable  to  receive  it.  "  You  deceive  yourself,  with 
your  historiettes  of  the  man  who  could  not  hear  the  word  of 
evil  against  you  without  giving  you  up  as  fast  as  the  young 
squire  of  the  Mall  gave  you  up.  Now,  don't  grow  red  and 
white,  Yolande  ;  it  was  no  fault  of  yours  that  two  men  had 
evil  minds  to  judge  evil  of  a  girl  on  a  word  or  a  look — 
the  look  of  an  affair.  Bah  !  I  would  not  have  given  my  old 
squire,  the  friend  of  the  Frenchman,  for  all  the  young  bears 
in  the  Pyrenees.  But  the  young  pastor  spoke  of  reclaiming 
you,  as  the  young  squire  did  not  presume  to  do.  Caleb 
Gage,t/?/s,  made  public  recantation  and  renunciation  of  his 
error  in  a  manner  which  Monsieur  the  Pastor  has  not  thought 
fit  to  do.  He  has  not  come  to  me,  and  said,  'Grand'mere,  I 
made  one  great,  proud,  uncharitable,  miserable  mistake,'  as 
he  ought  to  have  done." 

"  Grand'mere,"  interrupted  Yolande,  "  the  young  pastor 
has  weightier  matters  to  think  of — good,  great  work,  I  as- 
sure you." 

"  Weightier  matters  than  to  do  justice  !    Say,  then,  would 


TIIE    HUGUENOT  FAMILY.  341 

it  not  help  instead  of  hinder  his  good  work  if  he  saw  how 
to  do  justice,  and  did  it,  even  in  the  bagatelle  of  an  old  wom- 
an's feelings  ?  He  thought  enough  of  my  feelings  once  upon 
a  time,  did  he  not  ?  And  behold  the  young  pastor,  whom 
you  bid  me  contemplate  as  haviug  a  penchant  for  a  girl  who 
has  not  the  word  but  the  deed  of  evil,  in  so  far  as  having 
been  indelicate,  imprudent,  and  undutiful  was  concerned — 
what  have  I  to  do  with  such  an  inconsistent  young  pastor  ? 
Go  to  the  wars  with  such  a  pastor  !  I  hope  you  do  not  grow 
a  coquette,  Yolandette." 

"I  hope  not,  Grand'mere,"  said  Yolande,  laughing.  "I 
tell  you  I  have  no  reason  because  of  your  friend  the  pastor. 
I  shall  dress  the  hair  of  St.  Catherine  for  him.  Believe 
me,  Grand'mere,  he  does  not  thmk  me  at  present  a 
hundredth  part  so  interesting  as  Milly,  and  not  worthy  to 
hold  a  candle  to  her,  let  her  have  been  ever  so  naughty.  It 
is  a  frightful  misfortune  for  me,  but  I  will  do  my  utmost  to 
survive  the  mortification." 

Grand'mere  was  always  appeased  and  coaxed'by  her  child's 
gayety,  and  when  she  thought  over  the  report,  and  brought 
to  bear  upon  it  the  stores  of  her  experience,  she  came  to  re- 
gard it  in  quite  another  light,  though  it  took  some  time  to 
reconcile  her  to  it. 

"  Oh,  violins  of  the  village !  that  a  pastor  who  had  ad- 
mired a  swan  should  turn  to  a  goose,  though  a  disappoint- 
ment in  an  affaire  cle  cceur  causes  the  victim  either  to  be 
blind  or  to  see  double  for  nine  days,  and  during  the  precari- 
ous interval  he  may  marry  his  grandmother  or  the  fade  of 
the  village.  But  why  should  I  beat  the  pie,  the  parrot  ?"  con- 
tinued Grand'mere,  tapping  Yolande's  check  and  detaining 
the  girl  by  her  side.  "  She  has  quick  eyes  and  a  quick  tongue, 
but  it  is  the  nature  of  her  sex,  and  I  know  that  Yolande  has 
less  of  a  pie  and  a  parrot  than  any  woman  save  the  good 
Philippine.  Extremes  meet,  one  can  not  deny  it,  and  there 
is  a  generosity  and  a  generosity — a  generosity  which  is  vain, 
and  a  generosity  which  is  humble.  Monsieur  the  Pastor's 
generosity  is  a  little  touched  with  vanity.  Not  true,  hi  ? 
Well,  why  should  we  grudge  it  to  him  ?  It  is  a  world  bet- 
ter than  churlishness.  And  why  should  I  beat  you  or  any 
one  else,  cocotte,  because  the  good  God  has  helped  these  t  wo 
young  persons  by  putting  a  mutual  understanding  and  af- 
fection into  their  hearts,  which  may  make  their  growth  in 


342  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

grace  and  their  future  lives  easier?  Shall  I  say  that  their 
desire  for  God  is  not  pure  because  they  have  learned  through 
it  to  desire  each  other?  Say  it  who  will, I  say  it  not.  If, 
Ave  love  not  our  brother  whom  we  have  seen,  how  shall  we 
love  our  Father  whom  we  have  not  seen  ?  God,  is  He  not 
the  God  of  the  heart  as  well  as  of  the  conscience?  What 
am  I  that  I  should  judge  others?  Nay,  my  daughter,  the 
rector,  whom  thou  hast  called  a  Spartan  father,  will  not  be 
harsh  here.  When  the  young  pastor  will  go  to  him  and  say, 
with  sudden  insubordination  and  indignation, '  Monsieur  my 
Rector,  thou  are  too  severe  to  thine  own  flesh  and  blood.  I 
see  it,  and  I  will  tell  you  so  ;  for  I  .have  formed  an  attach- 
ment to  your  daughter  Milly,  into  which  her  Utile  faux  pas 
does  not  enter,  or  if  it  enters,  I  love  her  only  the  better 
for  it,  now  that  she  is  sorry  for  it,  and  I  can  shelter  her  from 
the  consequences,  and  put  it  out  of  sight  and  mind.  Mon- 
sieur my  Rector,  I  ask  your  daughter  in  marriage  with  the 
blessing  of  God — to  end  her  probation  and  mine,  and  to  be- 
gin a  joint  life  of  service  in  His  Church  and  at  His  altar.' 
Think  you  that  the  Spartan  father  will  be  incensed  or  implac- 
able at  that  discourse?  I  say,  no.  He  will  be  amazed,  though 
he  might  have  seen  it  all  along.  Perhaps — for  this  rector  is 
honest  and  cutting  as  a  knife — he  will  reply  at  first, '  Mon- 
sieur my  Cure,  think  well  what  you  are  about;  my  daughter 
has  not  been  so  discreet  as  I  would  have  wished,  and  if  in- 
discretion is  bad  in  a  pastor's  daughter,  it  is  worse  in  a  pas- 
tor's wife.'  On  that  the  young  pastor  will  protest  manfully, 
'I  have  no  fear;  Milly  will  never  be  foolish  again,  and  the 
grace  of  God  is  with  us  to  help  us.'  What  then  ?  The  rec- 
tor will  smile  and  frown,  and  talk  of  starving  on  a  curate's 
salary,  and  mean  it  not  at  all,  but  begin  to  think  what  he  can 
save  and  spare  for  the  young  couple,  and  take  his  cure's  arm 
while  they  consult,  and  lean  on  it  as  he  has  not  leaned  on  it 
before.  As  for  Madam,  she  will  fall  on  the  young  pastor's 
neck,  and  say  she  has  again  found  a  son  ;  and  then  the  rec- 
tor will  smile  more  sadly,  and  say  to  himself, '  A  son  comme 
'I  /'<>>//,  hut  a  different  son  from  my  Captain  Philip' — voikl 
tout!" 

And  ( Srand'mere  abruptly  ended  her  little  drama  triumph- 
antly. 

Grand'mere  was  light  to  a  hair's-breadth.     It  was  only 
Dolly  who  pouted  and  cried  out  in  objection,  and  Grand'- 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  343 

more  was  required  to  take  her  to  task  and  bring  her  to  or- 
der. "Didn't  our  Milly  run  away  and  make  a  fool  of  her- 
self, and  wasn't  our  papa  mortal  angry  at  her?  and  now  she 
is  to  have  a  husband  and  a  house  before  me.  It  looks  as  if 
it  were  just  because  she  fell  into  disgrace,  for  I'm  main  sure 
he  never  thought  of  looking  at  her  before.  I  grant  you,  it 
is  no  great  sort  of  a  man  and  a  house  she  will  have — I  would 
not  have  had  a  gift  of  them ;  still,  it  is  the  name  of  them, 
and  it  ain't  right  that  Milly  should  have  even  the  name  of 
preferment  before  me  now,  after  what  is  come  and  gone;  I 
tell  you,  I  do  not  like  it,  Grand'mere  Dupuy." 

"  Paper  bag !  my  little  girl,  you  must  take  the  world  as 
you  find  it.  There  is  no  right  such  as  you  think  of  in  the 
world ;  it  would  be  a  worse  world  than  it  is  if  there  were. 
As  to  the  big  preference,  I  know  none  that  the  good  God 
gives  us  for  being  virtuous,  or  faithful,  or  devout,  except 
what  is  contained  in  the  saying,  '  See  how  great  things  he 
or  she  must  suffer  for  my  sake.'  That  is  true,  Dolly,  and 
I  would  not  be  the  sacrilegious  wretch  to  throw  a  stone  at 
the  afflicted,  because  I  believe  that  they  are,  veritably,  the 
anointed  of  the  Lord." 

But  the  queerest  turn  which  events  and  opinions  took,  was 
with  regard  to  the  lonely,  homely  Corner  Farm  itself.  Dame 
Spud  and  her  good  man  were  growing  old,  and  had  already 
had  thoughts  of  retiring  from  the  leadership  of  the  van  of 
civilization  against  the  Waaste,to  spend  the  remnant  of  their 
days  by  the  hearth  of  a  married  daughter  in  the  snugness 
and  sociality  of  Sedge  Pond,  where  it  would  bo  an  easy 
walk  for  Dame  Spud  to  go  up  every  day  to  the  rectory,  with 
wool  and  yarn  knitted  hose,  to  wish  her  old  mistress  good- 
morning,  and  taste  her  cakes  and  cream-cheese. 

So  the  farm,  with  its  field  or  two  of  thin  corn  and  rushy 
pasture,  and  its  stock,  was  to  be  let  to  a  new  tenant. 
Houses  were  not  plentiful  in-  the  neighborhood  of  Sedge 
Pond,  and  the  income  of  a  curacy,  on  which  brave  and  res- 
olute women,  as  good  ladies  and  gentlemen  as  their  descend- 
ants, married  on  the  right  hand  and  on  the  left,  was  so  small, 
that  most  curates'  parsonages  were  not  a  whit  better  than 
the  Corner  Farm-house  could  be  rendered  by  a  little  paper- 
ing and  painting,  cherry-tree  wood  and  chintz.  And  the 
honest,  simple  mode  of  eking  out  a  living  by  undertaking, 
with  the  help  of  an  experienced  farm-servant,  to  cultivate  a 


344  THE    UUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

few  acres,  was  reckoned  a  resource  by  no  means  unbecoming 
a  gentleman  and  a  priest.  It  was  the  lot  finally  fixed  on 
for  Mr.  Richard  Hoadley  and  Mistress  Milly  Rolle. 

"  Ah !  that  poor  Milly,"  reflected  Yolande  in  dismay  when- 
she  heard  of  it;  "what  banishment  for  life!  What  exile 
must  it  be,  with  the  sentiments  of  Milly  !  She  will  pine 
away  and  perish,  even  with  the  consolations  of  religion  and 
the  company  of  the  young  pastor,  in  that  poor  Corner 
Farm." 

"  Tiens !  the  wind  has  changed,"  alleged  Grand'mere. 
And  so  it  had  ;  for  when  Yolande  went  to  visit  Milly  at  the 
rectory,  where  she  was  reinstalled  in  the  creditable,  sedate 
responsibility  and  grave  dignity  of  the  rector's  eldest  daugh- 
ter, just  about  to  be  married  to  his  trusty  curate,  she  found, 
to  her  bewilderment,  and  to  the  soft  tinkle  of  Grand'mere's 
laughter,  that  Milly's  tastes  in  reference  to  Corner  Farm  had 
undergone  a  complete  revolution.  At  this  later  date  she 
'was  all  for  the  charms  of  a  humble  rustic  home,  for  spinning- 
wheels — though  she  could  not  spin  a  stroke — for  pet  lambs 
and  calves,  notwithstanding  that  she  had  always  run  away 
from  the  merest  foal,  and  declined  to  say  bo  to  a  goose,  for 
making  bands  and  mending  cassocks ;  and,  though  she  had 
not  done  a  stitch  of  useful  work  in  her  life,  she  took  the 
whole  task  of  it  on  her  shoulders  without  a  moment's  hesita- 
tion. She  was  quite  full  of  gathering  plovers'  eggs  and 
picking  mushrooms,  and  preparing  the  early  supper  and  serv- 
ing it  to  the  tired  curate,  who  had  been  laboring  all  day 
among  the  poor  and  needy,  and  who  would  not  disdain  to 
bring  home  the  stranger  and  the  wanderer  to  share  the 
shelter  and  the  hospitality  of  a  lowly,  but  for  that  very  rea- 
son a  freer,  as  well  as  a  more  bountiful  roof.  So  Milly's 
ditty  rang — an  echo  of  Mr.  Iloadley's.  She  even  went  so 
far  as  to  remind  Yolande  of  a  crystal  rill,  which  she  declared 
trickled  over  a  mossy  bed  close  by  the  farm,  and  which  Yo- 
lande could  not  at  all  remember ;  and  she  waxed  enthusiast- 
ic about  a  peep  of  a  grove,  where  she  and  Mr.  Hoadley 
might  erect  a  seat,  which,  as  the  grove  consisted  of  three 
ami  a  half  bent,  blasted,  superannuated  ash-trees,  out  of  place 
en  the  Waiiste,  and  only  making  its  desolation  more  felt, 
Yolande  could  not  help  regarding  as  the  most  forlorn  objects 
breaking  the  horizon. 

"  How  tired  I  am  of  all  this  pomp  and  show !" — Milly 


THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  345 

confided  to  the  puzzled,  diverted  Tolande — "not  that  I 
blame  ray  papa  and  my  mamma  and  Doll,  for  they  have  never 
known  any  thing  else,  nor  been  brought  face  to  face  with 
Nature  to  fall  in  love  with  her.  How  I  long  to  get  back  to 
my  dear  modest  farm-house,  with  its  thatch  and  its  house- 
leek — Richard  says  there  must  be  a  house-leek — and  its  de- 
lightful dumb  cattle  all  among  the  wilds.  Of  course  I  know 
that  these  are  vanities  too,  Ma'mselle,  and  that  I  must  not 
make  idols  of  them  any  more  than  of  cedars,  and  ebony 
chairs,  and  brocade  gowns.  I  have  not  learned  to  know  my 
Mr.  Hoadley  so  Avell,  and  to  be  in  his  confidence,  without 
having  heard  that  needful  warning.  But  one  can  not  help 
being  mightily  taken  with  Nature  when  one  has  come  to 
love  her,  and  to  lose  taste  for  art  and  finery,  with  all  their 
poor  pretense  " 


CHAPTER  XXXI. 

THE   GATHERING    OF   THE   STORM. 

The  spring  awoke  at  Sedge  Pond.  But  it  came  intermit- 
tently with  bars  of  warm  brooding  sunshine,  in  which  buds 
swelled  and  grass  stirred  amid  gentle  pipings  of  song. 
The  dull,  dead  winter  air  was  alive  again  for  an  hour  or 
two,  and  there  were  bright  fieldlets  of  blue  sky,  in  which 
white  mountains  were  piled  up  gloriously  like  Islands  of  the 
Blest.  But  all  was  checkered  before  the  day  was  done  by 
the  scowl  of  low  gvey  clouds,  and  the  shrieks  of  the  piercing 
north-east  wind,  which  carried  in  its  train  the  sting  of  cut- 
ting hail  and  dash  of  drenching  rain.  And  by  some  secret 
sympathy  the  social  and  the  moral  world  seemed  to  reflect 
the  fitful  spring  weather. 

The  old  squire  of  the  Mall  had  left  his  son  with  great  dis- 
cretionary power  in  the  final  settlement  of  his  affairs.  The 
young  man  was  much  engaged  during  the  winter  and  early 
spring  in  fitly  executing,  to  the  best  of  his  belief,  his  father's 
will,  and  in  journeying  into  neighboring  counties  to  consult 
with  relations  who  were  united  with  him  in  his  trust. 

Peace  and  gladness  prevailed  in  Sedge  Pond  and  at  the 
Shottery  Cottage.  There  was  talk  of  an  early  seed-time,  a 
fresh  brilliant  summer,  and  a  fruitful  harvest,  intersprinkled 

P2 


346  THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

with  remarks  about  the  fine  doings  at  Mistress  Milly  Rolle's 
marriage  with  good  young  Mr.  Hoadley. 

But  a  change  soon  came  over  the  people  one  and  all,  from 
the  ale-house  to  the  Shottery  Cottage.  There  began  to  be  - 
rer-lless,  dissatisfied,  gloomy  prophecies  of  a  backward  sea- 
son, a  cold  rainy  summer,  and  a  bad  harvest.  Fainter  mut- 
terings  of  national  grievances  and  injuries  reached  the  sod- 
den, distorted,  rankly-overgrown  minds  of  Sedge  Pond. 
Late  in  reaching,  they  only  entered  the  more  firmly,  and 
threatened  a  terrible  crop  of  blind,  furious  prejudice  "when 
they  sprang  and  ripened.  And  so  the  villagers  came  to 
judge  that  if  there  were  failures  in  the  wars,  and  mistaken 
foreign  policy  in  government,  resulting  in  heavier  taxes  and 
damage  to  trade,  and  jn'indin^  still  harder  the  hard-ground 
faces  of  laborers  and  small  farmers,  nothing  was  to  blame 
for  it  but  the  wanton  truckling  to  foreigners  for  pieces  of 
velvet,  sets  of  lace,  china  babies,  and  pug  dogs,  which  fine 
gentlemen  like  Lord  Rolle  and  his  brother  could  not  live 
without.  But  the  gentry  were  dependent  on  foreigners  for 
other  supplies  than  these.  They  could  not  get  up  their 
screeching  Italian  operas,  their  dishes  which  no  plain  En- 
glishmen could  name,  nor  their  evil  domestic  vices,  which 
polluted  and  corrupted  the  country,  without  the  help  of 
some  Madame,  or  Ma'mselle,  or  Senora.  It  was  high  time 
the  country  were  well  rid  of  such  cattle,  and  if  it  were  true 
that  prices  were  to  be  high  and  food  scarce,  it  stood  to  rea- 
son that  the  people  should  put  useless  mouths  out  of  their 
quarters,  more  especially  when  they  were  the  mouths  of 
villainous  spies,  gabbling  treason  and  plotting  treachery 
against  their  foolish  hosts  and  entertainers.  The  natives  of 
Sedge  Pond  could,  of  course,  much  better  understand  a 
strong  instance  of  such  folly  immediately  before  their  eyes, 
than  the  complicated  sources  of  maladministration  and  abuse 
of  public  interest  and  public  funds,  which  were  removed  to 
a  distance  from  them.  Old  hairs  to  pluck  with  the  Hugue- 
nots, state  crimes,  some  as  good  as  a  century  old,  were  re- 
vived and  bruited  about  as  matters  of  yesterday  in  Sedge 
Pond,  and,  above  all,  over  the  tables  in  the  ale-house.  Mut- 
terings  of  the  monstrous  bounty  which  the  king  in  his  infat- 
uation paid  to  these  old  enemies  and  false  allies,  while  his 
own  loyal  and  straightforward  subjects  were  working  and 
starving  on  scant  wages,  served  like  the  wind  to  stir  up 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  347 

and  kindle  into  a  flame  the  smoldering  brands  of  grudging 
indignation. 

Even  the  refugees  who  at  this  time  passed  through  Sedge 
Pond  oftener  than  usual,  men  whose  brown  or  blue  suits 
were  for  the  most  part  only  remarkable  for  being  punc- 
tiliously long  in  the  skirts  and  high  at  the  ears,  but  not  a 
bit  less  threadbare  than  those  of  their  neighbors,  were 
nervously  conscious  of  suspicion  and  spite  dogging  their 
footsteps.  For  this  and  for  other  reasons,  Monsieur  con- 
fined himself  and  his  friends  more  closely  to  his  private  room, 
where  they  interchanged  and  examined  trade  parcels  and 
Huguenot  papei-s  until  far  into  the  night,  leaving  little  time 
for  social  entertainment,  and  hardly  so  much  as  an  oppor- 
tunity for  the  visitors  to  greet  so  venerable  a  mother  among 
the  Huguenots  as  Grand'mere.  He  bundled  away  the  stran- 
gers with  the  coach  next  morning,  and  stood  guard  upon 
them  till  the  last  moment. 

"  Grand'mere,"  observed  Yolande,  "  my  father  must  be 
very  busy  with  so  many  customers  and  agents  constantly 
coming  to  him.  Besides,  he  has  his  journeys  to  London 
and  Norwich,  which  I  observe  he  has  doubled  this  last  year. 
I  do  believe  it,  he  must  be  growing  rich,  and  I  shall  be  a  great 
heiress,  and  shall  found  a  charity  one  fine  day  like  that  of 
the  Mall,  or  a  hall  in  a  college  like  that  of  Sedan  and  Sau- 
mur,  where  your  relative  was  professor.  Is  it  not  so?  For 
all  the  boxes  with  my  poor  work  lie  powdered  with  dust, 
never  sent  away  since  the  day  of  the  year.  I  should  like 
well  enough  to  be  an  heiress,  but,  Grand'mere,  I  do  not  like 
my  poor  work  to  be  forgotten,  and  must  I  still  work  to 
have  more  of  it  packed  up,  powdered,  and  left  staring  me 
in  the  face  beside  the  commode  and  the  medics  every  time 
I  go  into  my  father's  room  ?" 

"You  must  work  still,  my  little  work-woman,"  said 
Grand'mere,  somewhat  absently,  and  with  a  little  worry  in 
her  placid  face  as  she  bent  over  the  caraways  and  helio- 
tropes in  her  window.  "  We  must  all  work*  in  faith,  our 
whole  lives  long,  and  we  must  not  think  too  much  of  bein<^ 
heiresses!,  not  even  of  the  kingdom  of  heaven,  though  that 
is  an  inheritance  incorruptible,  undcfiled,  and  that  fadeth  not 
away,  where  there  is  no  moth,  nor  rust,  nor  thief,  no,  nor 
contrabandist  nor  plotter — I  believe  it  well.  It  is  necessary 
that  we  think  of  God  who  works,  and  of  how  work  is  T>od 


348  THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

in  itself,  and  duty  good  in  itself.  All  things  are  very  good, 
petite,  and  we  may  need  the  help  of  the  least  of  them  yet.  I 
tell  you,  Yolande,  as  I  told  Dolly  yesterday,  that  on  this  crum- 
bling bit  of  earth  there  is  no  rest  or  prosperity  promised  to  us. , 
No,  truly,  there  is  strife  and  tribulation,  and  no  promotion 
save  that  of  suffering.  Nothing  is  sure  but  death.  If  we 
march  under  our  Leader's  orders  and  carry  His  cross,  which 
was  His  ensign,  it  is  necessary  that  the  battle  rage  loudest 
and  longest  round  us,  that  we  become  a  spectacle  to  men  and 
to  angels,  and  it  does  not  seem  to  me  that  this  can  be  helped 
any  more  than  His  agony  and  passion.  Yes,  it  is  sad  and  ter- 
rible, Yolande,  though  not  so  much  so  to  you  as  to  me;  for 
you  are  one  of  the  recruits,  who  are  all  for  the  prison  and 
the  death,  of  which,  like  Peter,  you  know  nothing ;  but  I 
know  a  little  of  what  the  prison  and  the  death  are — a  living 
grave  and  a  grinning  skeleton,  except  for  the  light  which 
shines  above  and  beyond  them ;  and  it  is  that  which  must 
fill  our  eyes." 

Yolande  wondered  why  Grand'mere  should  answer  her 
so  solemnly  when  she  herself  had  spoken  lightly,  almost 
jestingly.  She  was  farther  perplexed  that  Grand'mere 
should  put  her  off  when  she  attempted  to  investigate  what 
was  passing  around,  and  puzzle  her  by  wide,  homely,  signif- 
icant phrases. 

"  If  your  little  finger  tell  you  a  secret,"  insisted  Grand'- 
mere, "  repeat  it  not  to  your  thumb — it  is  a  prying,  meddle- 
some, seditious  rogue,  that  thumb.  Women  and  girls  are 
made  to  be  seen,  and  not  heard,  where  the  affairs  of  men 
and  fathers  are  concerned.  There  was  once  a  clever  woman 
who  could  not  be  still  as  a  mouse,  who  could  not  wait  like 
a  statue,  and  the  consequence  was  that  she  woke  up  one 
morning  and  found  herself  an  executioner  ;  and,  horror  of 
horrors!  she  had  been  the  Monsieur  Paris  to  her  own  fam- 
ily. She  had  meant  no  harm,  she  had  not  known  what  she 
Mas  about,  but  she  had  not  been  still.  Ah !  yes,  stillness 
is  a  great  virtue,  though  Solomon  did  not  speak  so  much 
of  it  as  of  strength  and  honor.  But  I  think  a  greater  than 
Solomon  praised  it  when  He  praised  the  better  part 
which  should  not  be  taken  away  from — a  woman.  And, 
oli  !  the  marvel,  how  He  praised  the  weak  women — this 
one  for  her  faith,  that  one  for  her  generosity,  and  that 
oilier  for  her  meek  reverence.     Ought  we  then  to  shrink 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  349 

from  meeting  the  fire,  and  standing  in  the  breach  when  lie 
wills  it  ?" 

But  sometimes  Grand'mere  herself  escaped  from  the 
thraldom  of  anxiety,  doubt,  and  apprehension  which  had 
laid  hold  of  her.  Her  suspicions  and  fears  would  then  ap- 
pear to  her  as  chimeras  bred  of  the  past  troubles  of  her  long 
and  changeful  life.  She  would  prattle  with  the  blithest 
about  the  spring,  for  which  the  old  tenderly  yearn,  and 
about  the  summer  which  was  coming,  and  about  the  young 
couple  whose  fortunes  lay  all  before  them,  and  to  whom  she 
had  been  a  friend  indeed,  and  with  regard  to  whom,  there- 
fore, she  was  entitled  to  have  the  grace  of  loving. 

At  last,  in  the  most  ungenial  mood  of  the  spring,  before 
the  teeming  world  of  herbs  and  insects  could  make  more 
than  a  cold,  shy  response  to  its  ardent  wooer,  there  arrived 
at  the  Shottery  Cottage  the  little,  gruff,  reserved,  grey  rab- 
bit of  a  savant,  who  had  worked  in  the  galleys,  but  now 
appeared  in  a  new  stock  with  a  buckle,  and  cuffs  reaching 
to  his  elbows.  He  received  every  thing  like  attention  and 
honor  as  cavalierly  as  ever,  and  was  not  much  more  com- 
municative on  his  present  purposes  and  plans  than  on  his 
old  history. 

But  when  Monsieur  Landre  was  sitting  with  the  Dupuys 
over  his  cafe  noir,  on  the  very  afternoon  of  his  arrival,  he 
suddenly  propounded  a  hair-brained  scheme.  The  whole 
family  at  the  Shottery  Cottage,  he  proposed,  should  quit 
Sedge  Pond,  carrying  their  household  gods  with  them.  He 
advised  that  they  should  start  with  him  for  London,  where 
he  would  get  lodgings  for  them  near  his  own,  in  Soho,  and  en- 
gagements in  his  manufactory,  if  they  wished  it.  The  great 
Mr.  Beutley,  he  said,  was  partial  to  emigres  among  his  de- 
signers and  colorists,  and  rewarded  them  liberally  for  their 
services,  besides  affording  them  the  satisfaction  of  seeing  a 
most  ancient  and  honorable  art  restored  to  its  merited  as- 
cendancy. 

The  Huguenots,  in  their  time,  had  been  well  accustomed 
to  hasty  fiights  and  unexpected  exoduses.  That  time  was 
gone  by  now,  however,  and  this  movement  seemed  on  called 
for,  and  in  a  great  measure  inexplicable.  But  Monsieur 
Landre  would  not  be  put  past  his  proposal  either  by  gloria 
or  coupeaux,  but  stirred  his  cup  vehemently,  and  poked  out 
his  head,  showing,  as  he  attempted  to  peer  with  his  scorch- 


350  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

ed  contracted  eyes  into  the  face  of  Monsieur  and  Grand'mere, 
that  he  had  adopted  a  pigtail. 

Yolaude  first  gaped  incredulously,  unable  to  realize  the 
possibility  of  such  a  step,  then  turned  round  wistfully,  and 
hung  breathlessly  on  Grand'mere's  reply. 

Monsieur  shrugged  his  shoulders,  and  cried,  "  Ta,  ta,  ta ! 
Farce  !     The  hangman!     To  France  sooner." 

But  at  this  the  pigtail  only  wagged  more  impetuously  and 
imperiously,  insisting,  in  dumb  show,  that  there  were  weigh- 
ty reasons  for  its  possessor's  startling  words,  and  asking  a 
more  serious  consideration  of  his  invitation  and  a  more  de- 
cided answer  to  it. 

Grand'mere  looked  at  her  son,  as  he  stuck  his  thumbs, 
English-fashion,  in  his  vest,  and  planted  his  feet  firmly  on 
the  floor,  smiling  re-assurance  at  her,  while  at  the  same  time 
he  raised  his  eyebrows  at  the  panic  of  poor  Monsieur  Lan- 
dre,  who  had  been  rendered  eccentric — tete  bleu  !  quite  un- 
hinged— by  his  early  adversity. 

"  My  very  good  friend  Landre,  the  geese  will  cackle — 
when  have  they  not  cackled?  but,  for  the  term  of  my  life,  I 
stir  not  from  this  delectable  spot,  where  I  have  pitched  my 
tent  and  planted  my  vine — in  a  figure,  for,  ouf!  tents  would 
have  much  cold  here,  and  vines,  alas !  would  not  grow,  un- 
less in  frames  of  glass." 

"Monsieur,  I  have  read  in  the  classics — theDelphin  classics 
— a  longtime  ago,  when  I  was  a  little  boy,  that  one  time  the 
geese  they  cackled,  and  the  people  they  heard  and  minded, 
and  what  happened  ?  The  Roman  capitol  was  saved,"  con- 
tinued Monsieur  Landre,  with  marked  emphasis. 

"The  historiette,'m  order  to  be  well  applied, has  need  of 
two  things,"  criticised  Monsieur,  carelessly  :  "  a  capitol  and  a 
foe.  That  is  what  I  say  as  a  man,  but  the  women  may 
judge  differently.  For  aught  that  I  know  they  may  be  dy- 
ing with  the  wish  to  see  the  town  again.  What  say  you, 
my  mother  ?" 

Grand'mere  looked  at  Yolande,  and  caught  the  extreme 
reluctance,  the  piteous  entreaty  which  spoke  in  the  girl's 
eyes.  To  have  gone  up  and  seen  the  great  town  and  the 
settlements  of  Huguenots  there,  would  have  been  very  well, 
and  Yolande,  girl-like,  might  have  welcomed  the  novelty 
and  the  excitement;  but  it  was  a  cruel  shock  to  hear  the 
talk  of  bidding  good-bye,  a  long  good-bye,  to  the  home 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  351 

where  Yolande's  heart  had  grown  up,  where  it  had  gone 
out  on  its  own  venture,  and  where  it  had  been  met  and 
driven  back,  and  all  but  wrecked,  by  storms. 

Grand'mere  bent  forward  and  took  the  empty  cup  from 
Monsieur  Landre's  hand,  then  took  the  baud  itself,  where 
the  deep  shadow  of  his  cuff  hid  the  weals  worn  and  seared 
into  his  boyish  flesh  three-fourths  of  a  century  before.  "  A 
thousand  thanks,  my  friend,"  she  said,  "  but  we  will  stay 
with  our  man  here.  It  is  not  worth  while  that  the  women 
risk  life  by  themselves.  What  can  harm  the  child  and  me 
and  Philippine — the  daughter,  the  mother,  the  wife  of  Hu- 
bert ?  We  go  where  Hubert  goes,  and  dwell  where  he 
dwells.  What  would  you,  my  old  man?  Is  not  that 
right." 

The  pigtail  shook  again,  but  more  slowly,  sadly  this  time. 
"  Si,  si  fait,  Madame."  Monsieur  Landre  acquiesced,  as  if 
in  a  looked-for,  almost  an  inevitable  defeat. 

Yolande  was  not  blind  or  deaf,  or  totally  incurious  and 
unalarmed,  though  she  had  not  the  experience  of  the  others 
to  forewarn  her,  and  though  she  had  been  brought  up  in  the 
total  passiveness  of  a  French  girl.  She  had  profited  suffi- 
ciently by  the  inspiration  of  her  Huguenot  origin,  her  life 
on  English  soil,  and  the  ties  she  had  formed  here,  to  have 
laid  within  her  heart  the  foundation  of  principles  of  inde- 
pendence and  energy.  She  was  therefore  shaken  to  the 
centre  by  the  vaguest  hint  of  evil  to  Grand'mere.  Yolande, 
under  pretext  of  presenting  Monsieur  Landre  with  the  petit 
verve  of  a  traveler,  contrived,  previous  to  his  departure, 
which  Monsieur  was  expediting  as  usual,  to  have  an  inter- 
view with  the  flimily  friend.  And  Yolande  tried,  as  far  as 
a  girl  like  her  dared  to  try  Avith  a  man  who  was  not  a  mem- 
ber of  her  family,  but  who  had  been  her  friend  and  teacher, 
to  get  an  explanation  of  his  mission,  just  as  she  had  sought 
enlightenment  when  his  wary  contradiction  and  reluctant 
qualification  of  her  delight  in  the  extravagant  popularity  of 
Grand'mere  after  the  Sedge  Pond  sore  throat  had  first  vex- 
ed and  disquieted  her. 

But  Monsieur  Landre,  like  the  great  majority  of  the 
French,  believed  a  girl  a  notably  unsuitable  recipient  of  a  se- 
cret of  any  kind,  much  more  of  an  important  and  dangerous 
secret.  Either  this  or  the  unutterable  loathing  with  which 
he  recoiled  from  expatiating  on  the  frightful  barbarities  of 


352  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

the  galleys,  had  rendered  him  incorrigible  in  his  reticence, 
and  made  him  a  man  of  mystery  to  the  end.  "  There  is 
nothing,  my  child,  nothing."  Monsieur  Landre  withdrew 
into  himself  as  he  took  snuff,  and  assured  Yolande  that  there 
was  "nothing  to  which  you  could  say  Men  entendu.  All 
the  world  knows  that  we  are  Huguenots,  and  dwell  among 
people  who  accord  us  shelter  and  a  bounty — not  always  at 
the  best  market.  But  I  do  not  pity  myself,  tout-pi  and 
tout-pa,  yet  I  have  had  more  to  pity  myself  for,  word  of  Den- 
is Landre !  The  English  have  been  good  to  me,  only  it  is 
necessary  that  we  French  and  Huguenots  hold  together  for 
the  nation  and  the  faith,  even  if  we  do  not  agree  on  other 
things.  Your  father  will  tell  you  that.  So,  Mademoiselle, 
if  you  have  ever  any  desire  to  change  your  abode,  to  come 
to  London  and  make  a  little  money — and  the  girls  of  the 
bourgeoisie  often  have  trades  or  serve  as  book-keepers  to 
their  fathers  and  uncles  in  France — you  will  find  a  friend  in 
me.  To  be  a  silk-weaver  in  Languedoc  or  Dauphine  before 
the  Revocation,  and  to  be  the  same  at  Spitalfields  or  Nor- 
wich, is  quite  another  thing.  Therefore,  if  you  come  to 
have  envy  of  my  aid  in  London,  Mise,  here  is  my  address, 
near  to  Soho.  If  you  will  come,  I  shall  show  you  my  gar- 
den on  the  roof,  such  as  there  is  not  another  in  London,  and 
my  menagerie,  and  you  will  become  my  little  pupil  again. 
Is  it  not  so  ?  And,  enfin,  I  may  have  the  honor  of  introduc- 
ing you  to  the  great  Mr.  Bentley." 

Monsieur  Landre  left  his  address  also  with  Grand'mere, 
of  whom  he  took  an  elaborate  farewell,  going  up  for  the 
purpose  to  her  room,  where,  in  her  white  embroidered  cap 
and  peignoir,  she  sat  up  in  her  great  bed  to  receive  him, 
while  it  was  still  the  raw,  chill  early  morning.  Monsieur 
Landre  kissed  Grand'mere's  hand,  and  Grand'mere  kissed 
her  old  friend  on  both  cheeks,  "  for  all  the  world  as  if  them 
two  were  ne'er  to  meet  again  here  below,"  as  Prie  blurted 
out,  Avhile  Deb  began  to  rebuke  her  elder  for  the  words 
the  moment  the  two  had  retired  to  their  kitchen. 

"  As  bold  as  a  hatchet,  then,"  said  Prie,  wrathfully  de- 
scribing the  liberty. 

"  What  for  could  you  ever  go  and  say  that,  Prie  ?"  re- 
monstrated Deb,  "  and  old  Madame  fourscore,  and  old  Mon- 
sieur beatin' Methusalem  ?  It  is  as  like  as  blades  o'  grass 
that  they'll  .never  see  one  another  alive  again,  Prie;  but 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  353 

how  ever  could  you  go  and  be  so  'ard  'carted  as  even  'em 
to  it  ?" 

"  'Ard  'earted  to  even  an  old  man  and  'ooman  whose  feet 
is  a-treacling  on  the  brink  of  the  grave,  that  mappen  they're 
saying  farewell  to  one  another,  and  to  right-down  turmoil 
and  misery  for  time,  that  they  may  be  free  to  say  good-clay 
to  dozens  of  friends  of  their  youth,  and  to  pure  peace  and 
blessedness,  for  eternity  ?"  So  Prie  protested  indignantly. 
"  'Ard  'earted  be  it  ?  But  if  ever  an  impudent  swatch  of  a 
babby  like  you,  Deb  Pott,  evens  old  Madam's  friends  to 
Methusalem,  and  old  Madam  hersen  to  being  fourscore  and 
not  long  for  this  world — what  have  you  to  do  with  that, 
a'd  like  to  hear  ?  And  haven't  you  knowed  and  seed  that 
the  young  go  afore  the  old  as  often  as  not  ?  If  you  say  a 
word  agin  it,  it  is  the  back  of  the  door  you'll  see  yet,  as 
sure  as  a've  been  christened  Prie." 

"  Hoadley,  do  you  observe  any  thing  strange  in  the  con- 
duct of  these  parish  gentry  of  ours  to  the  family  at  the 
Shottery  Cottage  ?"  anxiously  questioned  the  rector  one 
day.  "  Manners  are  not  what  we  may  pride  ourselves  on 
at  Sedge  Pond.  Though  the  people  behave  genteel  enough 
to  me,  I  confess  I  do  not  like  the  way  in  which  they've 
begun  once  more  to  stare  into  the  cottage  windows  and 
hang  about  the  garden  gate,  as  if  they  were  taking  observa- 
tions of  the  foreigners.  And  the  men,  I  notice,  gather  in 
knots  after  work  hours,  and  one  fellow  harangues  the  rest, 
as  if  they  had  all  a  common  grievance  which  he  expounded 
to  them.  Does  it  strike  you  that  there  is  any  thing  out  of 
the  common  in  the  villagers'  behavior — any  thing  danger- 
ous ?     You  know  the  Sedge  Pondians  are  rough  diamonds." 

"  No,  sir  ;  I  have  noticed  nothing.  Do  the  people  meet, 
sir?  May  it  not  be  to  talk  of  some  of  the  warnings  and 
awakenings  which  they  have  had  lately  ?  I  do  believe  some 
of  them  are  savingly  impressed." 

"  I  hope  so.  There  is  room,"  responded  the  rector, 
briefly  ;  "  but  I  wish  Mr.  Lushington  had  not  taken  this  time 
to  go  up  to  town  to  settle  accounts  with  the  family's  new 
butler.  lie  ought  to  be  familiar  with  the  signs  of  the  place, 
and  I  should  have  liked  to  have  heai'd  lii^  opinion,"  the 
rector  reflected,  as  if  he  did  not  find  his  intended  son-in-law 
very  practical. 

"I  do  not  think  there  is  the  slightest  fear  of  the  villagers 


354  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

being  guilty  of  any  thing  so  foolish  and  brutal  as  mischief  to 
the  Dupuys,  who  were  very  good  to  them  in  their  need ; 
you  surely  forget,  sir,"  the  curate  continued,  to  assure  the 
rector,  who  shook  his  head. 

Mr.  Hoadley  was  essentially  a  man  of  few  ideas.  His 
first  idea  had  been  himself;  his  second,  what  great  things 
he  should  do  for  his  Master  and  his  fellow-men.  He  was 
not  unkind  nor  ungrateful ;  he  was  any  thing  but  spiteful, 
for  his  own  heart  was  satisfied,  though  his  prospects  were 
different  from  what  he  had  pictured  to  himself.  With  all 
his  graces,  and  the  last  best  grace  of  Heaven  among  them, 
he  was  as  incapable  of  wide  apprehension  and  sympathy  as 
his  Mistress  Milly. 

The  rector  was  older  and  wiser,  but  he  still  flattered  him- 
self, as  on  the  occasion  of  the  election  (in  spite  of  its  lesson), 
that  he  could  overawe  and  master  his  people — that  he  could 
chain  and  gag  the  wild  beast  in  them,  the  wild  beast  which 
lurks  in  every  mob.  He  had  ridden  in  among  his  parish- 
ioners and  quelled  them  when  they  were  in  the  very  open 
act  of  violence,  ere  now,  and  he  had  faith  that  he  could  do 
so  again.  Thus,  by  the  heedlessness  of  one  watchman  and 
the  pride  of  another,  by  the  confidence  of  Grand'mere  and 
the  mingled  craftiness  and  recklessness  of  Monsieur,  chances 
were  lost,  and  time  passed  until  the  fate  which,  in  the  great 
march  of  events,  Providence  held  in  store,  was  at  hand. 


CHAPTER  XXXII. 

THE     STORM     BURST. 

"My  son,  you  must  go,"  said  Grand'mere,  when  the 
storm  burst  at  last,  and  Monsieur  was  made  aware,  through 
some  of  his  agents,  that  a  warrant  of  State  had  been  issued 
against  him,  and  that  an  officer  had  been  sent  from  London 
to  apprehend  him. 

Monsieur  had  dabbled  in  intrigues  all  his  life,  and  they 
came  to  him  almost  as  naturally  as  silk-weaving.  On  the 
whole,  they  had  been  for  Protestantism,  in  its  aspect  of  po- 
litical freedom,  as  he  recognized  it.  The  public  acknowl- 
edgment of  the  rights  of  the  Huguenots,  and  their  restora- 
tion to  their  native  land,  were  the  ends  he  had  had  in 


THE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  355 

view;  and  for  the  promotion  of  these  he  desired  the  estab- 
lishment and  prosperity  of  the  Whig  party,  and  the  confu- 
sion of  the  Tory.  But  it  is  hard  to  touch  pitch  and  not  be 
defiled.  If  Monsieur's  personal  interests  intruded  into  and 
defiled  his  schemes,  that  is  not,  on  the  whole,  surprising. 
If  he  introduced  a  little  smuggling  into  his  enterprises  in 
silks,  laces,  and  other  commodities,  and  was  in  the  habit  of 
communicating  such  private  information  very  impartially, 
either  from  France  to  England,  or  from  England  to  France, 
as  did  not  bear  on  his  main  projects,  it  was  a  course  from 
which  the  philosophy  of  Rochefoucauld  and  St.  Simon  by 
no  means  excluded  him.  All  honest,  God-fearing  men,  how- 
ever, called  it  public  treachery — treachery,  at  once,  to  the 
country  which  had  adopted  him,  and  the  country  which  had 
born  him. 

Monsieur,  certainly  not  a  coward  by  physical  organization, 
had  been  rendered  still  more  regardless  by  long  immunity 
from  punishment.  Thus  he  had  been  led  to  deride  Mon- 
sieur Landre's  desperate  attempt  to  win  him,  at  the  last 
moment,  from  the  volcano  on  which  he  was  standing. 
When  the  crisis  came  at  last,  and  exposure  and  retribution 
stared  him  in  the  face,  the  middle-aged,  double-minded, 
plausible  Monsieur  of  Sedge  Pond  went,  as  he  might  have 
done  forty  years  before  when  he  had  broken  but  a  few 
branches  in  his  father's  vineyard,  and  confessed  all  to  his 
mother.  He  poured  into  her  true,  tried  ear  the  full  tale  of 
his  sin  and  trouble,  and  waited  for  her  counsel  and  com- 
mands with  as  full  faith  in  her  as  though  she  had  been  a 
superior  being,  and  in  as  entire  submission  to  her  will  as  if 
he  still  lived  in  the  innocence  of  the  past. 

Grand'mere  did  not  say  to  him  that  he  might  have 
thought  of  the  long  lessons,  the  tender  yearnings,  and  the 
fervent  prayers  which  she  had  bestowed  on  him  through- 
out the  labyrinth  of  his  wanderings  ;  nor  did  she  say  that 
he  need  not  have  lapsed  so  far  from  the  spirit  of  these,  to 
come  to  her  at  last  for  comfort  after  he  had  gone  near  to 
break  her  heart.  She  might  chide,  and  she  had  often  chid- 
den, though  she  did  not  know  how  to  rebuke  her  devoted 
son  sharply.  But  to  reproach  him,  to  make  the  bitterness 
of  his  fall  more  bitter  to  him,  was  not  in  Grand'mere.  On 
the  contrary,  God's  pity  for  Hubert  was  to  be  reflected  in 
his  mother's  face.     It  was  to  be  the  most  loving  considera- 


35G  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

tion  for  his  suffering,  and  the  most  anxious  summoning  up 
of  all  her  energies  for  the  lightening  of  his  burden.  His  es- 
cape must  be  contrived,  justice  too  must  be  satisfied,  but  there 
was  no  law,  human  or  divine,  that  required  Monsieur's  old 
mother  to  give  him  up  to  the  State  which  he  had  offended. 

Happily,  from  Monsieur's  early  training  as  a  scout,  his 
business  connection,  and  his  familiarity  with  more  or  less 
unauthorized  modes  of  transport,  his  escape,  so  soon  as  he 
should  be  beyond  the  immediate  neighborhood,  became,  com- 
paratively, a  practicable  matter  even  to  trembling  women. 

"But  I  go  to-night,  that  is  certain,  and  how  will  you  be 
ready,  my  old  woman  ?"  asked  Monsieur,  careful  of  his 
mother  as  ever ;  "  or  shall  I  risk  waiting  at  Yarmouth  or 
Harwich,  so  that  you  can  follow  with  the  delay  which  is 
necessary  for  your  years  ?  No,  that  will  not  do.  I  can  not 
fix  on  either  port  till  I  am  on  the  way,  and  have  heard  more 
news  by  the  first  post.  I  may  have  to  change  my  route 
altogether,  and,  after  all,  I  do  not  think  I  could  trust  you 
alone  on  the  road.  Nay,  my  good  mother,  the  jockeys 
would  shake  your  grey  head  off  with  the  jolting.  The  En- 
glish dogs'  weather  would  freeze  you  to  the  coach  seat  or 
the  pillion.  Ah !  that  will  be  all  remedied  when  we  get 
to  the  Carolinas  in  America — that  refuge  of  the  Huguenots. 
But  for  the  present,  what  shall  we  do,  ma  mbre  fn 

"  I  shall  remain  here,  my  son ;  I  am  too  old  a  horse  to 
travel,"  replied  Graud'mere,  with  a  sickly  smile.  "  A  new 
half  of  the  globe  is  more  than  half  a  world  farther  off  than 
the  little  chamber  of  the  grave  to  a  woman  of  fourscore 
who  has  seen  nearly  all  her  contemporaries  housed  before 
her.  No,  I  say  not  that — I  eat  my  words  ;  but  I  can  not 
encumber  your  retreat.  Go,  Hubert,  make  a  new  home 
across  the  great  waves  of  the  Atlantic  among  the  colony  of 
our  people  in  the  Carolinas ;  and  if  there  is  still  breath  in 
this  rag  of  a  body,  I  shall  go  to  you,  my  gar$on  ;  but  I  can 
not  accompany  you — it  is  impossible,  you  must  see  it." 

"  Peste  !  it  is  more  impossible  for  me  to  abandon  you," 
persisted  Monsieur,  with  the  swollen  veins  of  a  mortal 
struggle  rising  on  his  forehead.  Here  was  his  Nemesis,  or 
was  it,  1 1  is  God  in  controversy  with  him  ?  Every  Huguenot 
knew  the  saying  of  Agrippa  D'Aubigne  to  Henry  of  Na- 
varre when  the  incorruptible  Protestant  saw  the  wound  in 
the  lip  which  the  rcnouncer  of  Protestantism  had  sustained 


THE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  357 

from  an  assassin's  dagger  :  "  Sire,  hitherto  you  have  denied 
God  with  your  lips,  and  God  has  been  contented  with  pierc- 
ing your  lips  ;  but  when  you  shall  deny  Him  with  your 
heart,  then  shall  God  pierce  your  heart." 

Were  God's  arrows  now  indeed  in  Monsieur's  heart  ? 
His  mother  had  never  ceased  to  be  the  pride  of  his  heart, 
the  apple  of  his  eye. 

"You  abandon  me  not,  my  son;  I  stay  by  my  own 
choice — that  is  to  say,  by  my  own  judgment  and  God's 
will.  I  can  not  do  more  than  is  possible  for  me.  I  stay 
only  till  better  days  come,  when,  if  I  am  not  gone  where 
you  will  follow,  Hubert,  you  will  reclaim  me." 

"  But  they  will  revenge  themselves  on  you,  little  mother," 
cried  Monsieur,  with  tears  as  he  rose  up.  "Alas!  they  will 
visit  my  offenses  on  my  mother,  and  I  must  save  myself 
from  that  extremity  of  wickedness  and  misery.  A  thousand 
times  rather  I  would  stay  and  brave  all.  What  are  their 
prisons,  their  Old  Baileys,  their  Tyburns,  when  it  comes 
to  her  cherished  head  ?" 

"  You  must  not  stay,  my  son.  You  must  have  care  for 
your  mother's  heart  as  well  as  her  head.  I  will  not  have 
you  to  stay,  I  have  said  it.  And  you  are  not  reasonable, 
Hubert,  my  poor  old  gars.  The  English  Government  is  just, 
is  honorable,  is  merciful  for  that.  You  have  abused  its  in- 
dulgence— alas !  it  is  true,  I  can  not  deny  it — but  it  would 
scorn  so  poor  a  prey  as  an  old  woman  in  her  son's  stead. 
The  English  Government  will  not  touch  me,  and  I  shall  not 
be  left  alone ;  I  shall  have  Yolaudc  and  Philippine,  and  the 
good  girls,  Prie  and  Deb,  to  bear  me  company.  Tiens! 
we  will  be — no,  not  merry  as  grigs,  that  may  not  be,  but 
safe  as  bats." 

"  I  shall  go  or  stay  as  you  and  my  father  wish  it,  Grand'- 
mere,"  submitted  Yolande,  with  a  great  gulp  of  terror  and 
distress,  recalling  now  with  consternation  and  remorse  how 
she  had  thought  and  looked  when  the  question  had  been  of 
the  Avhole  Huguenot  family  turning  their  backs  on  Sedge 
Pond  for  London. 

"  Of  course,  2^ctite,  you  will  do  as  you  ought,"  Monsieur 
accepted  Yolande's  offer  with  something  that  sounded  like 
supreme  indifference  after  what  had  gone  before  it.  "  But 
how  with  my  wife  ?" 

"For  me,  T    go   with  my  husband,"  declared  Madame 


358  THE    IIUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

with  some  severity,  taking  every  body  by  surprise,  though 
in  reality  nothing  could  be  plainer  or  more  likely  than  her 
behavior  when  her  friends  had  time  to  reflect  on  it.  It  was 
Madame's  duty  as  a  wife,  and  Madame  had  always  been 
devoured  with  a  desire  to  do  her  duty,  as  she  reckoned  it. 
She  believed  she  would  have  gone  into  the  a'lgues  mortes, 
have  suffered  a  dragonnade  in  her  own  person,  sooner  than 
knowingly  fail  in  her  duty.  She  had  almost  longed  for  the 
test,  she  had  half  envied  the  persecutions  of  the  Huguenots 
before  her.  She  had  taken  so  little  interest  in  the  country 
where  her  lot  for  many  years  had  been  cast,  that  she  did 
not  altogether  comprehend  wherein  lay  the  difference  be- 
tween Monsieur's  tribulation  and  the  old  woes  of  the  faith- 
ful. She  did  not  give  him  entire  credit  for  being  persecuted 
for  righteousness's  sake ;  she  had  too  keen  an  appreciation 
of  him  as  a  man  of  the  Avorld  for  that.  She  judged  that 
the  strait  was  occasioned  by  some  question  belonging  to  the 
Huguenot  alliance  with  perfidious  England  ;  but  undoubted- 
ly Monsieur  had  risen  in  Madame's  estimation  by  having 
come  under  the  grasp  of  the  law  of  the  land,  and  she  pre- 
pared with  gloomy  zest  and  dignity  to  share  his  risks 
and  hardship. 

Monsieur  had  always  been  bourgeois  enough  to  pay 
scrupulous  respect  to  the  rights  of  his  wife,  and  he  agreed 
to  Madame's  will  with  that  indefinable  mixture  of  compla- 
cence and  imperturbability  which  marked  him  in  all  his  re- 
lations with  her.  He  might  be  painfully,  even  dangerously 
cumbered  by  Madame's  journeying  Avith  him,  or  he  might 
be  in  urgent  need  of  a  woman's  cares  in  the  personal  details 
and  domestic  management  for  which  he  had  all  his  life  de- 
pended on  Avomen.  It  was  hard  to  tell.  There  remains 
only  to  record  that  Madame  decided  to  depart  with  him, 
ami  Madame  had  a  clear  title  to  dispose  of  herself  as  she 
wished.  Monsieur  bowed  over  the  bony  hand  ready  to  be 
put  in  his,  and  there  was  no  more  to  be  said. 

At  the  height  of  the  Huguenot  movement  and  the 
Huguenot  trials,  the  sudden  breaking  up  of  households  had 
been  a  common  occurrence,  and  partings  of  members  of 
families  for  indefinite  periods  to  enter  on  new  and  untried 
phases  of  life  the  normal  experience  of  the  people.  Grand'- 
mere  had  known  these  days,  but  she  had  been  separated 
from  them  by  a  great  interval  of  years  and  events.     In  spite 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  359 

of  her  cares  and  fears,  she  had  not  expected  to  know  them 
again,  and  however  they  might  come  to  her  daughter-in-law, 
they  came  to  her  with  the  dismal  odds  between  suffering 
for  conscience's  sake  and  suffering  for  wrong-doing.  When 
the  feet  totter  and  the  hands  tremble,  when  the  grasshopper 
becomes  a  burden  to  the  weary  heart  and  brain  Avhich  cry 
out  at  their  own  distorted  shadows,  the  effects  of  a  social 
earthquake,  tearing  them  from  the  supports  to  which  they 
had  clung,  are  very  hard  to  bear.  But  Grand'mere  bore 
every  thing  because  it  was  for  Hubert's  sake,  because  it 
was  her  cross  laid  upon  her  by  a  truer,  tenderer  friend  than 
Hubert. 

It  was  a  terrible  sentence  that  came  to  Monsieur.  Cut- 
ting off  his  right  hand  and  plucking  out  his  right  eye  would 
have  been  easier  than  what  was  demanded  of  him.  It  was 
like  giving  his  heart  from  his  bosom  to  resign  his  mother ; 
and  it  was  the  fruit  of  his  own  devices,  the  bed  he  had 
made  for  himself. 

"  I  have  been  a  bad  character,  ma  m&re,  in  spite  of  every 
thing,"  he  groaned  aloud  at  the  moment  when  he  was  to  go 
from  her — "  a  selfish  wretch,  a  reckless  villain." 

"  Not  true,  my  son,"  she  contradicted  him ;  "  but  you 
will  do  one  thing  more  for  the  love  of  the  old  woman,"  she 
pled,  holding  him  fast.  "You  will  believe  in  more  than 
her  when  she  is  no  longer  with  you,  that  you  may  love  and 
trust  still  when  she  is  gone  from  your  sight,  my  friend — 
that  we  may  hold  communion  together  when  our  bodies 
are  parted — ah !  my  child,  that  Ave  may  hold  communion 
together  forever." 

"I  will  try,  my  mother — and  you — you  will  pray  for 
your  faithless  son." 

And  surely  there  is  hope  for  such  men  as  Monsieur  when, 
with  all  their  corruption,  they  retain  in  their  right  hand  a 
jewel  of  the  first  water — filial  tenderness,  the  reverence 
unsurpassed,  all  but  unapproached,  for  weak  Avomanhood  in 
its  holiest  form  of  motherhood. 

Madame  broke  down  also,  at  the  instant  of  action.  She 
had  spoken  and  read  so  much  of  persecutions  that  she  had 
almost  persuaded  herself  that  she  had  been  in  the  thick  of 
them.  She  had  learned  to  think  of  them  as  a  croAvn  of  dis- 
tinction and  glory  reserved  for  the  salt  of  the  earth,  and 
quite  endurable  by  her,  at  least.     Madame  lived  to  find,fcke 


360  THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY. 

many  another  perfectly  sincere  Christian,  that  talking  and 
doing  are  operations  standing  far  enough  apart  from  each 
other ;  nay,  that  to  do  the  first,  however  fast  and  with  all 
the  warmth  in  the  world,  is  not  the  hest  preparation  for  the 
second. 

"  I  am  a  furious  poltronne"  cried  the  honest  woman, 
"  when  it  comes  to  leaving  the  corner  of  the  fire.  I  recoil 
from  it,  have  palpitations  of  the  heart.  I  know  not  how  I 
shall  pass  over  the  common  roads,  through  the  strange 
inns,  by  the  malhonnttes  gendarmes  of  the  ports,  how  I  shall 
survive,  even,  the  mal  de  mer,  which  a  child  of  a  traveler 
has  to  encounter.  How  it  can  be  that  before  the  turn  of 
the  clock  I  shall  say,  '•Adieu,  adieu, petite  mere,''  'Until  we 
meet  again,  Yolandette,' "  wept  Madame;  " quoif  I 
know  nothing,  I  know  not  myself.  I  feel  I  should  be  afraid 
to  remain,  to  be  among  women  alone  all  the  day,  like  a  con- 
vent of  nuns  without  the  breastwork  of  the  grating,  in  the 
middle  of  the  canaille.  Me,  I  can  not  tell  now  why  I  went 
not  out  into  the  midst  of  the  village  with  Grand'mere  and 
Yolande  to  nurse  the  sick  when  the  sickness  was  here. 
Was  it,  in  truth,  hard  apathy  ? — or  was  it  low  skulking  from 
the  beggar  of  contagion  ?  Allons,  I  know  not  myself  any 
longer,  and  from  what  I  do  know  I  despise  and  hate  myself. 
To  the  Lutherans,  the  Catholics,  the  executioner — though  I 
shall  screech  and  struggle  in  his  hands,  I  am  certain  of  it — 
with  this  cheat  and  traitress  of  myself!" 

"My  true,  my  honorable  Philippine,"  Grand'mere  con- 
soled Madame  with  fond  fervor,  "  thou  wilt  know  thyself 
again  better  than  ever ;  and  even  if  thou  shouldst  never 
know  thyself  again,  there  is  One  who  knows  thee  and 
judges  righteous,  yes,  merciful  judgment." 

Thus  it  happened  that  on  one  of  those  reluctant,  sullen 
spring  evenings,  when  the  twilight  seemed  to  scowl  and 
hide  its  face  from  the  drooping  buds,  which  withered  be- 
fore their  time,  Monsieur  handed  out  Madame,  and  waved 
his  hat  to  make  up  for  neglecting  to  kiss  his  hand  to  the 
remaining  inmates  of  the  cottage,  who  did  not  venture  to 
follow  the  couple  farther  than  the  door — the  sight  sending 
a  jealous  hue  and  cry  through  Sedge  Pond.  The  travelers 
carried  only  a  few  packages,  as  if  they  were  going  no  far- 
ther  than  Reedham,  or  at  the  most  Norwich,  on  a  rare  bit 
of  "pleasure.     They    did   not   set   out   in   the   great   mail- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  361 

coach,  which,  whether  it  went  or  came,  carried  always  with 
it  a  strong  flavor  of  London  aud  London  news,  but  in  a 
post-chaise,  the  grandeur  of  which  was  a  parting  offense  and 
•insult  to  the  villagers.  Nobody  dreamed  of  riding  post  be- 
low the  rank  of  the  rector  and  his  lady.  Even  young  Par- 
son and  Madam  Hoadley  would  be  counted  mad  should 
they  pretend  to  any  such  fine  doings  when  they  were 
"buckled."  The  houseful  of  women,  old  aud  young,  was 
left,  as  Madame  had  said,  without  even  the  barrier,  long  im- 
pregnable, of  the  grille,  on  the  hostile  soil  of  Sedge  Pond, 
where  enmity  had  resisted  so  many  friendly  overtures  that 
it  might  be  considered  to  have  prevailed,  aud  to  be  flourish- 
ing pure  and  undefiled. 

Within  less  than  a  week  after  this  event,  the  metropoli- 
tan officer  who  had  Monsieur  for  his  object,  arrived  at 
Sedge  Pond,  traveling  post  in  his  turn.  He  brought  the 
great  hue  and  cry  to  the  villagers'  itching  ears,  that  Mon- 
sieur Dupuy,  who  had  dwelt  so  long  among  them,  making 
a  handle  of  the  little  village  on  the  great  road,  had  been  an 
offender  and  impostor  all  along,  a  paid  agent  of  their 
natural  foes  across  the  channel,  transmitting  the  intelligence 
which  their  coach  became  a  vehicle  to  carry.  When  men 
could  be  hanged  for  a  single  act  of  smuggling,  and  when 
strings  of  men  had  been  lodged  in  Dover  and  York  Castles, 
aud  brought  out  and  executed  in  batches  for  being  mixed 
up  in  small  risings  and  riotings  under  a  paternal  govern- 
ment, Monsieur  seemed  to  deserve  not  simply  to  be  hanged, 
but  to  be  quartered,  and  every  creature  belonging  to  him 
to  be  hooted  aud  hounded  as  sinks  and  snares,  out  of  de- 
cent villagers'  company. 

Not  to  say  that  the  officer  proceeded  on  those  bloody- 
minded  principles.  He  was  a  man  of  the  abounding  good- 
humor  which  flows  from  one  who  is  at  once  pompous  and 
boisterous.  He  ruffled  it  a  little  like  a  justice,  stared  at 
Yolande,  but  was  reasonably  civil  to  Grand'mere.  He  ate 
what  was  set  before  him  with  wonderful  condescension,  and, 
as  if  that  were  not  enough  honor,  cast  sheep's  eyes  upon 
some  of  Grand'mere's  treasures,  and  threw  out  broad  hints 
for  them.  Finally,  he  carried  away,  as  a  triumphant  tribute 
to  his  rendering  himself  agreeable  to  the  ladies,  an  antique 
carved  flacon,  and  a  timbale  en  vermeil^ which  he  was  so  good 
as  to  call  two  outlandish  Toby  Fillpots.     He  had  made  an 

Q 


362  THE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY. 

examination  of  the  premises  previously,  and  had  not  been 
very  particular  after  he  had  discovered  traces  on  the  hearth 
in  Monsieur's  cabinet  of  an  extensive  conflagration  of  pa- 
pers. He  took  himself  off  without  farther  delay  or  injury, 
tut  unquestionably  he  cared  not  at  all  that  he  left  Sedge 
Pond  behind  him  in  a  ferment. 

In  the  ale-house  gossip  the  Royal  Bounty  to  the  French 
intruders  rose  rapidly  from  fifteen  to  fifty  thousand,  and 
then  up  to  a  million,  all  wrung  from  the  sweat  of  the  brow 
of  overtasked,  abused  native  subjects.  And  yet  Mounseer, 
not  content  with  ruining  the  credit  of  the  army  and  the 
navy  in  countless  battles  past,  present,  and  to  come,  was 
guilty  of  false  charges  on  illicit  information — how  obtained, 
or  for  what  purpose,  nobody  paused  to  ascertain — against  ev- 
ery individual,  great  and  small,  in  Sedge  Pond.  And  the 
effect  of  all  was  that  at  last  the  presence  of  even  a  dog  be- 
longing to  the  Dupnys  at  the  Shottery  Cottage  was  looked 
upon  as  a  monstrous  affront  and  scandal. 


CHAPTER  XXXIII. 

SCAPE-GOATS. 

Gka^d'mere  and  Yolande  were  profoundly  ignorant  of 
the  state  of  public  feeling  at  Sedge  Pond.  Grief  swallow- 
ed up  apprehension.  The  two  women  had  kept  close  with- 
in doors  since  the  revelation  of  Monsieur's  delinquency, 
and  were  waiting  and  watching  intently  for  tidings  of  the 
fugitives. 

Deb  was  the  herald  of  the  villagers'  malice.  "  If  so  be 
you  be  able  to  bear  it,  old  Madam — you  do  be  the  only  Mad- 
am as  is  left  to  us — don'tee  miss  Madam  proper's  rare  la- 
ments on  we  and  the  wicked  world  ?  Her  bark  were  worse 
than  her  bite,  it  were ;  and  the  house  do  be  main  dull  and 
dozened  without  her  melancholic  ditties  ;  sure  she  would 
have  enjoyed  a  stramash,  and  her  up  to  the  mast-head  on't, 
to  cry, '  Come  on.'  But  a'  div  think  us  ought  to  tell  'ee,  old 
Madam — you  do  be  old,"  Deb  went  off  again,  frank  as  she 
was,  fain  to  beat  about  the  bush;  "though  big  Prie  dared 
me  to  even  the  likes  of 'ee  to  hoary  heads,  and  though  there 
been't  a  younger  Madam  here-away  now.     For  that  matter, 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  363 

Madam  as  were  here  weren't  young,  were  of  the  kind  that 
ain't  ever  young,  like  a  plant  of  southernwood.  Prie  and 
me,  we  be  pinted  at,  and  cried  to,  and  fouled  with  dirt, 
whenever  Ave  enters  the  street." 

"  Chickens  will  be  chickens,  and  children  children,  my 
best  Deb,"  answered  Grand'mere,  composedly.  uHein  ! 
wert  thou  not  a  child  once,  thy  wise  self?" 

"  There  been't  no  childer  in  the  business.  There  be  men 
with  slouching  shoulders,  and  beards  on  their  chins,  as 
wern't  never  childer  in  my  time.  One  of  them  shied  a 
stone  into  the  garden  gate,  last  time  a'  passed,  as  had  brain- 
ed a  child,  and  been  its  monument  forby.  It  was  the  same 
man  as  taunted  Prie  with  being  refugees'  spawn,  sold  to 
the  Devil,  and  showing  the  cloven  hoof  for  a  sign.  A'  man 
at  no  price  go  out  into  the  street,  nor  you,  Madam,  nor 
Ma'mselle,  till  the  ill  blood  be  spilt." 

"I  go  out  this  afternoon,  Deb  ;  I  go  where  I  have  gone 
before.  I  wish  to  ask  for  the  little  child  who  has  the  fract- 
ured limbs,  and  for  the  old  woman  who  has  the  cramps.  I 
crave  pardon  for  not  having  asked  before  these  days  ;  I  have 
been  very  selfish.  Yolande  carries  the  tisane  bienvenue! 
The  men  know  us  well ;  they  have  been  rejoiced  to  see  us 
ere  now ;  they  will  call  no  names  to  us,  but  have  shame, 
compunction.     Behold  all !" 

The  men  had  some  shame:  they  drew  back  and  shrank 
out  of  sight  when  the  old  woman  sallied  out  among  them, 
with  no  armor  but  the  benefits  she  had  rendered  to  them, 
and  the  good-will  she  bore  them.  But  Grand'mere  found 
every  door  once  more  shut  in  her  face  by  hands  which  had 
been  stretched  out  to  her  in  their  extremity — hands  that 
she  had  grasped ;  while  blood-shot  eyes,  which  had  looked 
into  her  dove-grey  eyes  with  an  agony  of  appeal,  and  had 
not  looked  in  vain,  now  covertly  watched  her  rejection  with- 
out a  sign  of  relenting. 

Discomfited,  Grand'mere  returned  home,  curbing  her  in- 
dignation, and  resolutely  resisting  the  dread  and  sinking  of 
the  heart  which  stole  over  her.  She  only  looked  wistfully 
in  Yolande's  face,  and  whispered,  "  They  will  know  us  better 
some  day,  paximettQ  ;  it  is  we  who  are  poor  miserables  to- 
day— but  they  will  live  to  know  us  better — at  last." 

That  night  stones  were  thrown,  and  not  ^at  the  garden 
uate  alone.     A  volley  rattled  against  the  diamond-shaped 


364  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

windows  of  the  cottage,  and  shivered  them ;  and  toward 
dusk  an  instalment  of  a  disorderly  mob  which  had  collected, 
kindled  a  bonfire  in  the  street,  in  dangerous  proximity  to 
the  thatch  roofs,  and  not  a  hundred  yards  from  the  gable 
of  the  Shottery  Cottage.  In  the  childishness  of  folly  and 
violence,  the  men  shouted  and  gesticulated  round  it,  and 
ended  by  giving  a  display  of  small  puppets,  hastily  manufact- 
ured of  straw  and  rags,  and  having  a  far-fetched  resem- 
blance to  a  man  and  several  women,  arrayed  in  cloaks,  hats, 
hoods,  jackets,  and  caps.  These  rude  symbols  were  persist- 
ently jerked  and  danced  with  frantic  fervor  in  the  light  of 
the  flames  which  flashed  on  the  broken  windows,  until,  with 
oaths  and  cries,  they  were  hustled  and  flung  into  the  heart 
of  the  fire,  which  consumed  them  forthwith. 

Grand'mere  acted  like  a  vraie  chdtelaine — with  spirit  and 
sense.  She  allowed  no  lights  within  doors,  and  made  the 
shutters  fast,  to  exclude  as  far  as  possible  the  light  without. 
But  she  would  not  hear  Prie's  dry  suggestion :  "  There  be 
oceans  of  hot  water,  Madam,  in  the  great  kettle,  so  be  they 
come  underneath  the  wall,  a-clambering  to  the  winders. 
And  the  wench  Deb,  she  be  right-down  confident  that  she 
could  fire  Mouuseer's  fowling-piece,  as  would  send  a  bird- 
shot  or  two  into  the  faces  of  the  ringleaders." 

Notwithstanding,  there  was  no  sleep  for  the  household 
of  the  Shottery  Cottage  that  night,  as  they  sat  with  nerves 
on  the  stretch.  Small  spurts  of  rage  and  valor  came  and 
went,  but  soon  waned  for  want  of  expression.  And  it  was 
with  the  increasing  fear  of  beings  defenseless  and  timid  by 
nature,  that  they  waited  and  prayed  for  the  ashy  grey  of  the 
spring  morning. 

Long  before  morning,  both  fire  and  mob  died  away. 
But  it  was  peculiar  to  the  slow,  stealthy,  brooding  village 
nature,  that  its  blind  wrath  rose  and  fell  and  rose  again,  and 
that  there  was  no  security  in  its  temporary  lull,  for  it  always 
returned  to  the  charge,  and  step  by  step  advanced  to  its  end. 
The  rector  had  some  knowledge  of  this  characteristic  of  the 
villagers.  He  went  himself  to  the  Shottery  Cottage,  early 
on  tlie  following  day,  for  the  first  time  since  he  had  received 
the  account  of  Monsieur's  true  character  and  flight.  His 
purpose  was  to  request  Grand'mere  on  no  account  to  at- 
tempt to  cross  the  threshold,  or  to  suffer  any  of  her  family 
to  go  out  till  he  gave  her  leave.     At  the  same  time  he  wish- 


THE   1IUGUEN0T   FAMILY.  <3b5 

ed  to  comfort  her  with  the  assurance  that,  if  the  village 
reallv  rose  and  threatened  to  molest  her,  he  would  be  on  the 
spot  to  put  an  end  to  the  proceedings  without  so  much  as  a 
necessity  of  reading  the  Riot  Act- 
By  noon  the  village  was  re-enforced  by  stragglers  who 
had  crone  to  their  work  in  the  morniner  and  had  come  home 
for  dinner.  They  brought  with  them  country  recruits  mad 
with  the  information  of  the  mighty  favors  which  had  been 
lavished  on  foreigners  by  a  false  government,  and  the  poor 
return  which  had  been  paid  for  it,  as  proved  by  the  base 
betrayal  of  Sedge  Pond  by  the  Dupuy  family.  The  popu- 
lation in  the  neighborhood  was  not  strictly  agricultural.  It 
included  an  unsettled,  semi-lawless  class,  some  of  whom 
were  engaged  as  goose-herds,  and  others  as  snipe-shooters 
and  cockle-gatherers  from  the  coasts.  They  formed  fit 
audience  for  such  a  rumor,  and  were  well  calculated  to  im- 
prove the  occasion  of  its  delivery. 

When  the  shadows  began  to  lengthen,  the  village  and 
its  allies  rose,  and  presented  a  ragged  regiment  of  smock- 
frocks  and  soiled  caps.  Their  hearts  were  filled  with  black 
envy  and  rancor,  their  fists  were  equal  to  hammers,  and 
there  were  bludgeons  bristling  here  and  there,  more  than 
enough  to  cow  and  scatter  like  small  dust  the  frail  troop 
of  women  opposed  to  them,  even  though  every  woman  had 
possessed  the  bones  and  sinews  of  young  Deb  Potts. 

In  the  ragged  regiment,  there  were  women,  too,  who 
wore  red  cloaks,  or  were  in  their  house  attire.  They  were 
stolid  and  sullen,  or  light-headed  and  giddy  slatterns,  who 
had  come  out  to  egg  on  the  men. 

The  Shottery  Cottage  was  in  a  state  of  siege.  There 
was  no  longer  room  to  doubt  the  fact,  and  the  malice  of 
the  besiegers  was  momentarily  growing,  like  the  surge  and 
swell  of  the  sea  in  a  storm. 

The  rector  arrived  to  redeem  his  pledge,  and  addressed 
the  people  in  the  tone  of  an  undaunted,  indignant  gentle- 
man : — "  My  men,  what  do  you  mean  by  this  un-English 
work?  Are  you  aware  that  you  are  simply  molesting  a 
houseful  of  women — ladies,  my  friends,  and  their  servants? 
If  you  have  any  grudge  against  Monsieur — he  is  a  single 
man,  still  he  is  a  man — wait  till  he  turn  up,  and  then  settle 
it  with  him  lawfully ;  but  don't  bully  women,  else  I'll  think 
you  a  greater  set  of  curs  than  I  took  you  for.     Come,  you 


3GG  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

rascals,  disperse,  and  have  done  with  this  ugly  mockery, 
or  it  will  be  the  worse  for  you." 

To  the  rector's  dismay,  his  remonstrance  and  sharp  rep-; 
rimand  produced  no  effect,  except  in  the  way  of  calling  forth 
dogged  growls,  squaring  of  backs,  setting  shoulder  to 
shoulder,  and  at  last  a  low  roar  of  recrimination — "Have 
done  yoursen,  Pearson.  Mind  your  own  business — this 
here  be  none  of  yourn.  You  be  took  in  yoursen,  with  the 
rest  of  the  gentry,  by  the  French  scum.  Remember  your 
darter,  good  young  Mr.  Hoadley's  wife  as  is  to  be,  and  how 
nigh  hand  she  were  debauched  by  the  slyboots  here,  as 
quiet  as  a  May  puddock,  with  her  charity  and  her  religion. 
Go  home,  and  be  thankful  that  your  lass  has  escaped,  and 
let  us  a-be  to  root  out  the  nest  of  hornets,  and  save  our 
lasses." 

It  was  to  no  purpose  that  Mr.  Philip  Rolle  kept  his 
ground — nay,  forced  his  person  into  the  closely-wedged 
mass — that  he  singled  out  individuals  to  call  them  by  name, 
and  abated  his  dignity  to  shout  and  threaten  in  his  turn. 
lie  was  under  the  disadvantage  of  not  towering  on  horse- 
back, having  neither  riding-whip  nor  spurs  to  cleave  the 
ranks,  and  lash  and  stamp  down  resistance.  He  had  not 
the  Riot  Act  in  his  pocket  to  pull  out  and  read,  summoning 
the  people,  under  the  pains  and  penalties  of  the  law,  to 
break  up  and  withdraw  to  their  own  homes.  And  even 
although  he  had  possessed  both  aids,  the  tide  by  this  time 
was  running  too  strong  against  him.  All  the  weight  of  his 
cloth,  character,  and  family  only  served  to  protect  his  own 
head  from  the  passion  and  prejudice  of  the  people. 

The  rector  was  the  one  man  in  the  crowd  to  give  in — 
and  it  was  for  the  first  time  in  his  life.  He  retreated  to 
the  rectory,  but  it  was  to  lose  no  time.  In  grief  and  horror 
he  recalled  that  there  was  no  justice  nearer  than  young 
Gage  of  the  Mall.  He  quickly  resolved  to  mount  his  old 
hunter,  My  Lady,  and  gallop  to  the  Mall,  to  secure  the 
squire's  concurrence.  Then  from  the  Mall  he  would  ride 
1o  Ueedham,  to  see  if  there  was  a  corps  of  yeomanry  on 
drill  at  the  market-town,  and  to  beg  the  chief  magistrate 
and  i  lie  commanding  officer  to  give  him  the  support  he  re- 
quired.  lie  knew  that  it  would  be  night-fall  before  he 
could  bring  a  regular  force  to  Sedge  Pond,  relieve  Grand'- 
merc,  and  put  down  the  riot.     But  he  was  not  a  man  to 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  367 

succumb  to  despair  in  the  shape  of  difficulties,  or  to  leave  a 
stone  unturned  when  there  were  deeds  to  accomplish.  He 
calculated  on  the  wholesome  effect  of  the  honest  light  of 
day,  and  expected  that  no  over-act  of  violence  greater  than 
the  insults  of  last  night  would  be  committed  without  re- 
peated adjournments  to  the  ale-house.  He  might  be  in 
time  after  all. 

In  the  meanwhile  he  dispatched  another  message  to 
Grand'mere,  giving  special  instructions  to  the  messenger 
that  he  should  procure  admission  to  the  cottage,  and  re-as- 
sure the  poor  Frenchwomen  by  informing  them  of  his 
plans.  The  messenger  was  Black  Jasper,  and  he  attained 
his  object.  Massa's  imperative  orders,  and  the  irritating 
treatment  which  he  himself  received  from  many  of  his  or- 
dinary acquaintance  in  his  progress,  urged  him  on.  For 
the  rabble  of  Sedge  Pond  were  in  that  fitful,  excitable,  and 
exacting  humor  when  small  provocation  was  needed  to 
raise  their  gorges.  Black  Jasper's  color,  coupled  with  some 
inkling  of  his  errand,  which  they  were  not  so  far  gone  in 
their  work  as  to  stop,  was  the  grievance  in  this  case. 

"  Another  strange  crow — a  black  beetle  who  mappen  had 
his  venom,  like  the  rest  of  them,  for  all  his  pretended  soft- 
ness. He  had  been  mortal  quick  in  taking  up  with  the 
cottage  cattle,  and  had  run  at  the  beck  of  the  old  witch 
every  time  he  had  seed  her,  as  gin  she  had  been  Pearson's 
son.  To  the  wall  with  the  grinning  blackamoor — whack 
him  out  of  the  village  after  his  friend  Mounseer  !" 

Black  Jasper  entered  the  Shottery  Cottage  in  a  bath  of 
sweat,  and  his  woolly  hair  on  end  in  mingled  fury  and  fear. 
It  was  clear  that  he  must  perforce  remain,  the  only  man 
garrisoning  the  cottage.  He  could  not  face  a  return  to  the 
rectory,  even  to  obey  Massa. 

The  rector  heard  of  this  detention  as  he  was  mounting 
his  horse,  and  had  to  quiet  Madam  and  his  daughters  as 
he  best  could;  for  Mr.  Hoadley  chanced  to  be  at-  the  other 
end  of  the  parish,  whither  he  had  been  summoned  to  attend 
a  death-bed.  The  rector  told  himself  that  it  was  well,  for 
he  would  never  be  able  to  convince  Mr.  Hoadley  that  the 
assembly  was  not  a  congregation  got  together  without  any 
exertion,  and  to  which  he  would  declaim  till  the  yells  of 
the  mob  drowned  his  text  and  murder  was  committed. 
The  Huguenot  women  would  not  be  much  the  stronger  for 


368  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

Jasper's  manhood,  but  the  fellow  was  Philip's  fellow,  and 
as  blindly  faithful  as  any  dumb  animal.  He  had  obeyed 
his  master  at  least.  But  what  if  Philip's  Jasper,  one  of  the. 
few  relics  of  his  young  captain,  came  to  grief!  The  rector 
dashed  off  at  the  thought  more  like  a  dragoon  than  a  black- 
coat,  setting  his  teeth  to  keep  down  his  emotion. 

Nothing  worse  happened  as  yet,  but  even  that  was  omi- 
nous. The  lounging,  grumbling  men  suddenly  shook  them- 
selves up,  took  the  garden  gate  off  its  hinges,  and  poured 
into  the  garden  with  a  wild  whoop.  They  then  set  them- 
selves to  all  manner  of  mischief  about  the  pond,  the  bower, 
and  the  small  miniature  alleys  aud  oseraie,  as  if  that  were 
all  their  purpose.  This,  however,  might  serve  to  detain 
them  opportunely  till  other  than  moral  force  was  brought 
to  bear  upon  them  ;  for  Monsieur,  in  pursuance  of  his  own 
game,  had  taken  care  that  the  Shottery  Cottage  had  mas- 
sive shutters  and  strong  bolts  and  bars.  So  if  its  occupants 
would  only  sit  like  hares  on  their  form,  it  could  offer  as 
good  passive  resistance  to  attack  as  places  of  far  greater  im- 
portance. 

But  the  performance  of  the  Sedge  Pond  villagers  was 
not  in  itself  cheering  as  beheld  by  the  owners  of  the  garden. 
The  bleak  spring  weather  had  taken  a  turn  for  the  better 
that  day ;  the  wind  had  veered  from  north-east  to  south- 
west, and,  blowing  softly,  was  wooing  a  hundred  unsus- 
pected allies — bud  and  leaflet,  and  little  wakeful  tomtit  and 
willow-wren  and  field-mouse — to  come  forth  and  show  them- 
selves. It  was  such  a  sweet,  hopeful  spring  day  as  might 
make  an  old  woman  young  again,  and  such  had  made 
Grand'mere  young  when  she  had  gone  abroad  and  cried 
out  with  joy  at  the  sight  of  the  first  jonquille  and  violet, 
and  had  sat  in  the  arbor,  framed  by  the  periwinkle  and  ivy, 
and  held  the  interview  with  Lady  Rolle.  The  cold,  blue- 
grey  periwinkle  flowers  were  in  blossom  again,  and  hands, 
the  grime  of  which  Grand'mere  had  ever  respected,  were 
rudely  tearing  down  greenery  and  frame-work,  while  ruth- 
less feet  were  trampling  willfully  among  the  plants  of  the 
strange  little  colony  of  caraway,  endive,  and  chicory  with 
which  the  emigrants  had  tried  to  cheat  themselves  into  the 
belief  that  their  garden  was  a  French  garden. 

Yolande,  peeping  sorrowfully  out,  and  Avitnessing  the 
havoc,  was  engrossed  by  it,  the  more  so  that  in  her  igno- 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  369 

ranee  she  did  not  feel  much  fear,  till  Grand'mere  recalled 
her.  Grand'mere  had  seen  such  ruin,  and  worse,  of  which 
this  apprentice  job  was  but  the  precursor.  But  she  did  not 
wish  to  see  it  again.  Besides,  she  had  work  to  do  ;  and 
Grand'mere's  spirit  had  flashed  up  to  meet  the  occasion. 
She  moved  about  in  the  darkened  house  as  nimble  as  a  girl. 
She  gathered  round  her  in  the  parlor,  under  one  pretense  or 
another,  the  whole  camp — and  how  small  it  looked  !  Staid, 
surly  Prie  tossed  her  head  a  little,  as  she  had  done  when 
Mr.  George  from  the  castle  ran  away  with  Ma'mselle.  Deb 
Potts,  no  more  than  stimulated  by  the  skirmishing  she  had 
engaged  in,  was  eager  to  seize  the  rolling-pin  or  the  tongs 
from  the  stove,  in  lieu  of  Monsieur's  fowling-piece,  which 
she  was  forbidden  to  handle.  Black  Jasper — not  so  much 
tossing  his  head  like  Prie,  as  staggering  unsteadily  under 
the  influence  of  a  kind  of  Dutch  courage  which  kept  him 
up  in  the  mean  time — was  the  most  hysterical  of  the  house- 
hold. Last  of  all,  Yolande  stood  sad  and  scornful,  for  she 
wTas  at  the  age  when  principles  are  lofty,  and  faith  in  human 
kind  has  a  dash  of  splendor,  in  contemplation  of  jealous  mis- 
understanding, vile  ingratitude,  and  dastardly  outrage. 

Grand'mere  took  her  cue,  and  began  to  speak  of  her  own 
old  experience — the  experience  of  her  sect  and  nation  in 
wrong  and  suffering,  which  Madame  her  daughter-in-law 
had  so  loved  to  record.  She  told  how  Madame  de  la  Force, 
of  the  haute  noblesse,  had  been  shut  up  for  years  in  a  com- 
mon prison  sooner  than  renounce  her  creed  ;  how  carefully- 
nurtured  young  girls  of  the  bourgeoisie  had  lain  festering  in 
the  hold  of  a  slave-ship  bound  for  the  Barbadoes,  when  a  word 
would  have  set  them  free,  and  restored  them  to  their  coun- 
try and  their  friends  ;  how  Judith  Maingault,  who  had  been 
among  the  first  Huguenot  settlers  in  America,  had  subsisted 
six  months  without  bread,  enduring  hardships  under  which 
strong  men  had  fainted  and  fallen.  Most  of  the  company 
had  often  before  heard  the  stories,  but  to  a  different  accom- 
paniment. They  had  a  new  meaning  from  Grand'mere's  lips 
at  this  season.  They  caused  the  shouts  of  contumely  ring- 
ing round  the  Shottery  Cottage  to  sink  into  a  confused  mur- 
mur, or  to  change  into  something  like  plaudits,  when  Grand'- 
mere wound  up  her  narrative  with  the  words — 

"  Yes,  my  children,  we  want  an  evangel  for  scenes  like 
these,  and  folk  like  these,  more  than  we  want  one  that  will 

Q2 


370  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

take  in  the  persecutors.  If  a  philosophy  can  be  found  to 
serve  the  spiritiielle  and  the  gracious,  let  them  keep  it.  I 
believe  not  in  it ;  but  that  goes  for  nothing.  What  it  is 
that  I  want  is  an  evangel  for  one  and  all — silly,  rude,  hard- 
ened, gross,  cruel ;  for,  see  you,  though  they  kill  me,  I  am 
not  so  unlike  them — not  so  blameless,  noble,  sage,  tender — 
that  I  can  not  claim  kindred  with  the  offenders,  that  I  can 
not  call  to  mind  offenses  of  mine  which  I  have  committed  in 
my  day,  little  brothers  and  sisters  of  their  offenses." 

"  Well-a-day,  then,  us  wants  such  an  evangel  a  power 
more  than  you  do,  Madame,"  chimed  in  Deb  Potts  in  the 
name  of  the  convicted  listeners. 

The  afternoon  was  wearing  on.  Longer  shadows  were 
barring  the  pure,  sweet  light  falling  so  strangely  on  the  big 
men  transformed  into  senseless,  reckless  children,  and  invest- 
ed with  a  power  which  they  abused  to  work  mischief. 
The  question  was  whether  the  emeute  would  exhaust  itself 
in  the  trifling  demonstration,  or  whether  the  taste  for  de- 
struction, like  the  taste  for  blood,  would  increase  with  indul- 
gence. There  was  one  of  those  pauses  of  hesitation  or  de- 
bate with  better  and  manlier  instincts  which  had  character- 
ized the  tumult  all  along ;  and  the  household  thus  marked 
out  and  tormented,  as  they  looked  and  saw  the  wasted 
spring-garden  half  deserted,  began  to  lift  up  their  heads  and 
think  their  trial  was  past.  But  when  a  fresh  band  of  smock- 
frocks  and  towering  faces  hurried  in  on  the  little  green 
stage  before  the  cottage,  and  a  hoarser,  more  brutal  shout 
than  any  which  had  yet  been  raised,  called  for  the  old 
witch — 

"  We  want  the  old  witch  as  bewitches  all  who  come 
near  her,  Pearson,  and  Pearson's  daughter,  and  Deb  Potts. 
Han't  Deb  hersen  said  'twere  witchcraft,  and  her  good 
mother  bade  her  ware  of  it,  afore  her  were  taken,  and  Deb 
were  sold  under  the  spell?  We  will  be  bewitched  next 
oursens ;  there  will  be  ill  among  our  beasteses ;  there  be't 
already.  Jack  Bar's  cow  had  a  turn  hinder  night.  Sam 
Hart's  colt  flung  in  stable  and  broke  his  grey  mare's  leg. 
Lance  Gill's  gander  thrust  his  neck  into  a  cranny  on  Cliff- 
beck  and  were  strangled.  Let  us  see  whether  the  old  witch 
will  pretend  to  cure  them.  We  wunnot  abide  no  more  of 
her  doings  ;  we  will  have  her,  and  her  stick  with  her,  and^ 
see  whether  her  will  sink  or  swim,  that  will  we — " 


THE    IIUGUENOT    FAMILY.  3  71 

Yolande  threw  herself  before  Grand'mere,  and  aghast 
with  impotent  anger  and  terror  clung  to  her,  determined 
that  she  herself  should  be  seized  first,  and  that  nothing 
should  separate  the  two. 

Prie  muttered,  "  They  do  be  in  a  frenzy,"  and  stared  trans- 
fixed. Black  Jasper  gave  a  great  womanish  sob,  and  Deb 
came  forward  towering  in  her  height,  purple  with  passion, 
her  teeth  set  desperately, "  A'se  go  out  t6  them,  madam,  and 
eat  my  words.  Dear  heart,  a'  wull.  A'se  not  be  forbidden, 
though  they  catch  and  duck  me  ower  and  ower.  An  ill  tongue 
suld  be  torn  out  by  the  roots,  Scriptur  do  say ;  and  a'  had  an  ill 
tongue  that  day,  but  a' kno wed  no  better,  as  mother  kuowed 
no  better.  The  Lord  he  do  have  forgiven  her  for  her  igno- 
rance, so  you'll  forgive  me,  old  Madam,  and  a'se  bear  my  pun- 
ishment. Nay,  now,  it  been't  by  a  heap  so  bad  to  go  out  and 
say, '  You  raging  tykes,  as  fact  as  death  a'  leed  yon  time,  a  tell- 
ecfa  clean  idle  lie,  that  you,  Ma'mselle,  as  took  me  in  out  of  the 
sickness,  and  took  care  o'  me,  and  made  a  'oman  of  me,  which 
mother  owned  with  her  last  breath,  and  Prie  that  bore  with 
me,  and  even  this  blubbering,  engrained  thing  of  a  man, 
should  go  for  to  think  a'  were  a  beast  goin'  back  to  my 
beastesness,  to  stand  and  hear  my  own  wicked  words  raked 
up  agin  you,  and  not  to  go  out  and  cast  them  in  the  bil- 
lies' teeth,  and  gasp  out  round  denials  of  them,  were  vil- 
lagers to  ram  the  denials  down  the  throat  o'  me." 

"Softly,  softly,"  said  Grand'mere,  in  her  paleness,  seeking 
to  calm  Deb.  "  No,  my  girl,  you  shall  not  go.  Nobody 
will  put  herself  in  peril  for  me.  I  say  it,  and  I  have  been 
accustomed  to  be  obeyed  all  my  life.  Ah  me,  there  are  few 
left  to  obey  me,  but  you  are  one  of  the  few,  my  Debtore,  and 
you  will  not  stir  a  finger  to  disabuse  the  marauders.  What 
will  you,  when  they  accuse  even  a  poor  stick  like  Madame 
Rougeole — the  poor,  dear  Madame,  who  won  her  name  by 
the  little  children's  beds,  and  with  whom  they  were  wont 
to  play  ?  But  names  are  not  stones,  fifille,  they  break  no 
bones.  For  that  matter,  the  revilings  and  the  caresses  are 
alike  in  this  respect,  that  one  must  bestow  them,  and  one 
must  receive  them,  while  the  world  lasts.  'There  is  one 
who  kisses,  and  one  who  extends  the  cheek.'  Is  it  not 
so?"   - 

Deb  was  forced  to  submit,  but  she  was  discontented  and 
restless,  while   whistles  and    vociferated    demands  for   the 


372  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

old  witch  continued  to  sound  under  the  very  window. 
In  her  discomfiture  she  flew  up,  fell  upon  Black  Jasper,  and 
snubbed  him  severely  for  his  disconsolate  wail,  and  the  pros- 
tration it  implied  : 

"  Gin  ye  do  not  give  ower  that  bellering,  as  is  making 
of  my  head  split,  my  black  babby,  that  we  'omen  be  to  stand 
round  and  fight  for,  a'se  be  rid  of  that,  at  least,  for  a'se  march 
ye  out  of  the  outer  door  straight." 

"  Oh,  mercy,  Miss  Deb !     I  can  not  help  it,"  protested 
Black  jasper,  wild  with  a  new  panic,  "  no  more  than  you 
can  help  your  bad  words.     Forgive  me,  Miss  Deb,  that  I 
take  the  liberty  of  mentioning  them,  since  you  mentioned 
them  fust  yourself,  and  Black  Jasper  allers  follows  where  the 
ladies  leads.     I  ain't  a-funning  now,  Miss  Deb,  I  give  my 
word  of  honor ;  and  I  dunnot  know  a  bit  what  I'm  doing 
for  the  clatter  of  that  crew.     Them  tears  aire  in  my  consti- 
tootion,  I  s'pose.     They  will  come — allers,  aud  the  giggling 
alongst  with  them ;  though  I  han't  much  to  laugh  at,  lawks  ! 
you  knows  that  as  well  as  I,  'cept  it  be  that  my  own  massa 
is  gone  home  before  me,  and  p'r'aps  he  sees  that  I  am  here 
for  obeying  of  his  massa ;  and  so  he  stoop  down  and  say,  as 
he  used  to  speak  cheerily  afore  the  furious,  bloody  battles, 
'  Courage,  Jasper.     Why,  you  oughtn't  to  have  been  a  boy 
at   all,  but  a  girl;  you   aire   so  chicken-hearted.     Still  we 
know  who  is  true  and  kind,  eh,  lad  ?     It  will  all  be  over 
soon,  and  the  day  is  ours.'     Cap'n  Philip  may  stoop  to  say 
that  when  they're  tearing  down  the  house  about  our  ears ; 
and  then  I'll  hold  my  puffing  and  panting,  though  my  liver 
is  white,  as  the  whole   rectory  kitchen  says — queer  that, 
Miss  Deb,  when  the  rest  of  me  is  black.     I'll  stretch  a  pint 
and  make  out  to  answer,  '  Look  here,  Cap'n  Philip :  though 
I  was  chicken-hearted,  I  han't  ever  failed  you,  have  I?  or 
your  massa,  or  the  old  lady,  not  when  I  could  sarve  you. 
So  you  go  quick,  Cap'n  Philip,  and  report  me  to  the  Gen'r'l.' 
I'll  be  precious  spent  with  the  fit,  Miss  Deb,  if  I  don't  make 
out  to  say  that  much." 

"  Tout  doucement"  Grand'mere,  who  had  been  silent  and 
thoughtful,  had  to  say  again.  "  It  is  necessary  that  a  house 
be  not  divided  against  itself  either  in  peace  or  in  war.  Valid 
you  had  your  own  faults  to  answer  for  a  few  minutes  ago, 
my  brave  Deb.  Leave  the  boy  alone.  And  you,  my  gay, 
who  were  the  willing,  quaking  messenger  of  Monsieur  the 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  373 

Pastor,  who  does  not  know  what  the  quakes  say  ?  Go  !  I 
have  another  halm  for  your  woes  aud  your  quarrels,  though 
I  am  not  a  witch.  On  the  contrary,  I  have  read  this  in  my 
Bible  ;  and  since  it  is  for  reading  my  Bible  that  I  am  in 
this  England,  it  is  good  that  I  remember  its  least  little  les- 
son. Not  true?  After  a  great  saint  and  apostle,  Paul, 
with  his  fellow-voyagers,  had  been  exceedingly  tossed  by  a 
tempest  during  many  days,  he  besought  his  companions 
that  they  should  take  meat,  assuring  them  that  not  a  hair 
should  fall  from  the  head  of  any  one  of  them.  Let  us  also 
break  bread  and  hope  in  God.  But  you  are  young,  my 
children  and  I  am  old — old  even  by  comparison  with  Big 
Prie  ;  for  I  was  an  anxious  woman  when  she  lay  smiling  in  her 
cradle.  There  is  one  advantage  which  the  grey-headed  can 
claim — they  have  fasted  from  so  many  things  in  their  lives, 
that  their  sluggish  blood  and  feeble  pulses  need  less  renew- 
ing than  the  swift  stream  in  the  throbbing  veins  which 
nourish  the  black  and  brown  heads  that  are  still  erect  and 
stately.  Hein,  Prie,  think  of  something  more  available 
than  the  madness  of  the  world.  Return  thanks  for  your 
pot-d-feic,  my  fine  woman,  when  your  wits  and  all  in  the 
cuisine  have  gone  a  wool-gathering.  I  shall  watch  a  little 
longer  here  while  the  rest  of  the  troop,  every  one,  and  Yo- 
lande,  the  first  in  order,  show  the  example,  and  go  to  the 
kitchen  at  the  back  of  the  house,  out  of  the  sound  of  the  din, 
and  sup  the  bouillon  as  so  many  hungry  children.  I  will 
have  it  so.  I  have  told  you  I  am  always  obeyed,  and  no- 
body is  to  begin  contradicting  me  now.  What  can  happen  to 
me  ?  You  are  all  within  hearing.  I  do  not  dote  ;  I  am 
not  infirm  ;  but  a  capable  old  woman  of  my  years,  the  good 
God  be  praised  for  it!  I  will  not  be  watched  or  guarded. 
Chut !  It  is  not  polite — it  is  an  intrusion,  when  you  know 
as  well  as  I  that  the  blessed  oaken  shutters  would  keep  out 
a  cannon-ball.  Leave  me  to  my  own  thoughts  ;  they  and  I 
are  not  so  ill-acquainted  that  I  should  feel  shy  of  being  left 
alone  with  them.'' 

But  eager  as  Grand'mere  showed  herself  to  dismiss  her 
circle  for  rest  ami  refreshment,  however  slight,  Bhe  had  a 
special  word  to  say  to  each  in  the  act.  "My  Lame,"  she 
detained  Prie  a  moment, "  often  have  you  served  the  bouil- 
lon for  me;  you  would  have  gone  hungry  yourself,  mUU 
fbt8t that  it  might  be  strong  and  rich  tor  me,  as  I  taught 


3f  4  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

you  to  make  it,  and  the  omelettes  en  chemise,  and  the  frotte- 
ment  and  the  cirage  of  the  floors ;  I  taught  you  them  all. 
Oh,  del !  they  were  happy  lessons  these,  and  one  of  them 
will  refresh  your  own  heart  to-day,  and  you  will  live  long 
yet  to  refresh  others.  Why,  Prie,  you  are  a  young  girl  to 
me,  and  I  shall  leave  you  in  charge  of  Yolande  one  of  these 
days. — My  Deb" — Grand'mere  caught  up  the  remorseful 
Deb — "  my  Deb  with  the  tongue — it  is  a  savage  beast,  that 
tongue,  which  no  man  can  tame.  Nevertheless,  the  fear  of 
God  in  a  good  heart  will  tame  it. — My  boy,  fear  must  not 
master  us,  for  whether  white  or  black,  we  have  one  Master, 
even  Christ,  so  it  is  we  who  ought  to  master  fear,  whether 
it  be  a  sin  or  a  weakness,  for  He  cai-ries  both  our  trans- 
gressions and  our  infirmities. — Yolandette,"  Grand'mere 
turned  wistfully,  "  you  do  not  grudge  that  you  have  let 
father  and  mother  go  unhurt  and  stayed  with  me,  to  meet 
the  retribution?  Grudge  it  never, petite — take  it  for  your 
consolation.     It  is  nearly  over  now." 

Left  alone,  Grand'mere  remained  perfectly  still  for  a  few 
moments,  with  nothing  save  her  lips  moving.  Then  she 
began  to  peep  out  into  the  garden  and  to  listen,  as  she 
herself  would  have  said,  like  a  lynx,  with  her  head  turned 
toward  the  back  of  the  cottage  and  the  kitchen.  At  last 
she  heard  the  sound  she  waited  for.  She  got  up  quietly, 
and  took  Madame  Rougeole.  "  They  shall  have  the  old 
witch,  Madame  and  all,"  she  said  to  herself.  "  Madame 
Rougeole  was  my  mother's.  These  carved,  red-headed 
sticks  wei*e  the  fashion  in  her  province.  Madame  Rou- 
geole, in  her  little  coral  dress,  has  been  in  our  family  for 
generations.  But  the  people  will  not  be  defrauded  of  her 
that  the  children  may  go  free — they  would  not  long  go 
free  otherwise.  I  spied  a  ladder  and  an  axe  deposited  at 
the  corner  of  the  house.  My  old  eyes  arc  quick  to  discern 
such  tools ;  and  they  may  well  be  so,  for  they  early  learned 
the  look  of  them,  and  we  return  always  to  our  first  fear  as 
to  our  first  love.  It  is  better  that  Madame  Rougeole  should 
go  with  me,  for  if  it  come  to  the  worst,  the  sight  of  her 
would  only  torture  Yolandette's  poor  broken  heart.  My 
God,  bind  up  this  broken  heart ;  bid  these  stones  rise  up 
and  be  friends  to  her;  be  Thou  her  friend,  and  she  will 
want  no  other." 

Grand'mere  was  making  her  preparations  all  the  time 


THE    HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  375 

that  she  thus  murmured  to  herself  and  to  her  God.  When 
they  were  finished,  she  stole  past  the  passage  which  led  to 
the* kitchen,  and  by  the  withdrawal  of  a  bolt,  slipped  out 
into  a  small  out-building  attached  to  the  cottage.  In  it 
she  found  an  old  duflie  cloak  belonging  to  Prie,  and,  on  the 
spur  of  the  moment,  put  it  on,  hood  and  all.  It  was  much 
too  large  for  her,  and  she  had  to  gather  it  round  her,  and 
hold  it  up  like  a  beggar  in  a  cast  garment  that  had  not 
been  made  to  fit  heiC  But  for  that  reason  it  was  the  more 
appropriate  for  her  purpose,  and  muffled  her  more  com- 
pletely. There  was  no  back  entrance  from  the  street,  back 
entrances  being  among  the  superfluities  of  the  age.  She 
must  make  her  way  out  by  the  one  little  yawning  gate-way 
from  the  garden,  if  she  was  determined  to  break  the  rec- 
tor's prohibition.  She  did  mean  this,  and  she  had  availed 
herself  of  the  moment  when  the  foes  were  clustered  like 
bees  hi  the  porch,  those  who  remained  without  being  strag- 
glers engaged  in  putting  the  last  touch  to  the  demolition 
of  the  young  plum  and  peach  trees  already  powdered  with 
blossom.  If  she  moved  quickly  in  the  shadow  of  the  wall, 
and  did  not  stop  for  breath,  or  falter  and  look  back,  she 
might  slip  out  when  all  heads  were  turned  in  an  opposite  di- 
rection, and  get  fused  and  melted  among  other  grey  cloaks 
worn  by  hangers-on  on  the  outskirts  hi  the  village  streets. 

The  bravedd  woman  accomplished  her  end,  and  found 
herself,  unsuspected,  among  the  motley  smock-frocks,  tat- 
tered aprons,  and  disreputable  false  sailors'  jackets.  What 
refuge  should  she  aim  at?  The  rectory?  It  was  at  the 
other  end  of  the  village,  and  she  could  not  hope  to  pass  so 
far  without  being  remarked  upon,  accosted,  and  detected. 
And  she  would  carry  a  fire-brand  to  the  rectory  in  the  ab- 
sence of  its  master,  while  she  would  be  leaving  so  many 
sheep — her  own  sheep — among  the  wolves.  Nay,  she  had 
not  quitted  her  own  household  in  ruins  to  carry  ruin  to 
another ;  she  had  not  deceived  her  people  and  l  olande, 
and  broken  faith  with  them,  for  such  an  end.  She  had  not 
so  learned  motherhood,  Huguenotism,  and  Christianity. 
She  made  for  the  ale-house  itself 

"If  I  give  myself  up,"  Grand'mere  reasoned,  "the  vil- 
lagers will  span'  my  child  and  my  servant-.  At  least  there 
will  be  delay;  and  the  pastor  will  return  with  forces  in 
time  to  save  them.     If  I  give  myself  up,  the  villager-  may 


376  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

relent,  and  think  what  have  I  done  to  make  them  hate  me 
so.  If  not,  it  is  but  the  pouring  out  of  the  last  drop  of  a 
mortal  life  from  which  the  flavor  is  gone,  since  my  son  was 
compelled  to  leave  me.  And  it  is  to  ransom  my  darling, 
though  it  break  her  tender  heart  to  begin  with." 

Happily  Grand'mere  knew  thoroughly  every  step  of  the 
littered  way,  every  bend  that  it  took  past  sluttish  sodden 
cottages,  every  ascent  to  manure  heaps,  and  descent  to 
draw-wells ;  her  old  feet  could  have  trodden  it  comfortably 
had  she  been  blindfolded.  The  hubbub  and  confusion  of 
the  unusual  concourse  were  in  her  favor,  for  while  on  any 
ordinary  occasion  she  could  not  have  traversed  the  same 
distance  on  a  spring  afternoon  without  being  remarked  as 
a  stranger  in  her  old  cloak,  as  it  was,  she  was  sufficiently 
mistress  of  herself  to  abstain  from  any  act  hi  flagrant  dis- 
cord with  her  general  appearance.  She  took  a  circuit  of 
Deb  Potts's  mother's  house,  and  other  hovels  where  she 
had  fought  the  Sedge  Pond  sore  throat,  and  at  length  ar- 
rived opposite  the  overgrown  blooming  red-brick  building, 
Avith  every  avenue  thrown  wide  open.  Skittle-ground, 
bowling-green,  and  cockpit  were  deserted  on  this  day,  with 
its  first  promise  of  summer.  The  objects  to  be  seen  at  the 
end  of  the  outlets  were  sloppy  tables,  surrounded  with 
lolling,  loud-tongued  men,  scarcely  less  hot,  and  consumed 
by  their  own  heat,  than  the  great  blazing  fires  which  light- 
ed up  each  brown  room,  and  flickered  fantastically  on  the 
faces  of  each  company  of  besotted  conspirators. 

Grand'mere  was  looking  about  for  a  side  door  by  which 
she  had  entered  Avhen  she  had  on  a  former  occasion  visited 
the  ale-house.  She  stood  still,  for  the  first  time  doubtful 
where  to  go,  but  not  without  taking  the  precaution  to 
draw  herself  away  into  the  shelter  of  the  beech  hedge  of 
the  forsaken  skittle-ground,  when  a  hand  was  laid  on  her 
cloak  from  behind. 

She  gave  a  great  start  at  the  arresting  touch,  followed 
by  a  greater  start,  and  then  an  audible  misericorde  /  but 
there  was  none  to  hear  her  save  the  arrester. 

It  was  Tolande,  who,  quick  to  penetrate  Grand'mei-e's 
plot,  had  run  at  her  kinswoman's  heels  with  only  the  dark 
skirt  of  her  gown  drawn  over  her  head  to  hide  her  identity. 
Grave  and  pale,  Yolande  flushed  like  a  child,  almost  exult- 
ant at  not  having  been  left  behind  and  outdone. 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  377 

"  You  could  not  cheat  me,  you  could  not  get  away  from 
me,  Grand'mere.  What  should  I  have  said  to  my  father 
and  my  mother  if  you  had  gone  without  me  ?  Bah  !  I  am 
your  young  recruit,  ma  jn&re,  whom  you  enlisted  an  age 
ago,  and  what  have  I  done  that  you  should  try  to  get  rid 
of  me  ? — that  you  should  think  me  a  %)oltronne  to  hold  back 
when  you  lead  the  way  ?" 

For  once  in  her  life  Grand'mere  wrung  her  hands  at  the 
disobedience  of  Yolande. 

"  What  is  it  that  you  have  done,  unfortunate  one  ?  Is 
there  to  be  no  young  hostage  recovered  from  the  wreck  for 
the  poor  fugitives  who  were  persuaded  to  go  ?  My  heart 
bleeds  for  them,  for  Hubert,  for  Philippine." 

But  even  while  Grand'mere  spoke,  it  became  evident 
that  remonstrance  and  return  were  too  late  for  Yolande. 
An  indefinite  intuition,  a  vague  doubt  was  working  itself 
into  a  certainty,  and  changing  into  the  muttering  of  baffled 
exasperation.  There  would  be  no  farther  protraction  of 
the  business,  or  any  lingering  for  dusk  to  veil  the  cruelty 
and  shame  of  its  completion.  Pricked  on,  feet  and  hands 
would  plant  the  ladder  and  wield  the  axe  in  the  provoca- 
tion of  the  revenge  which  was  to  have  been  so  sweet — the 
perpetrators  feeling  that,  in  their  clumsy  tardiness,  revenge 
and  prey  were  alike  slipping  through  their  fingers.  There 
would  be  brief  bandying  of  rough  words  with  the  women- 
servants  and  Black  Jasper,  ere  the  three  were  gagged  and 
tied  to  buffet  and  bed-post,  with  the  doors  double  locked 
upon  them,  and  the  full  stream  of  the  riot  surging  on  the 
track  of  Grand'mere  and  Yolande. 

"I  meant  to  give  an  old,  travel-stained,  worn-out  offer- 
ing," confessed  Grand'mere;  "but  it  was  not  worthy, there 
must  be  another — the  best  we  have  to  present  of  the  youth 
and  the  flower  of  the  stock.  I  thought  to  buy  life  for  my 
child,  but  God  says,  'No,  it  must  be  death,'  for  that  is 
purer  and  sweeter  with  an  immortal  purity  and  Bweetness, 
and  God  knows  best.  Ah!  well,  Folande,  we  will  go  in 
and  announce  ourselves  and  deliver  ourselves  together. 
There  is  one  thing,  see  you,  we  will  purge  those  floors  for- 
ever of  their  rude  grossness;  they  will  nut  have  the  heart 
for  it,  they  will  have  the  fear  of  it,  after  the  glory  of  what 
we  will  do." 


378  THE    1IUGUEN0T   FAMILY. 


CHAPTER  XXXIV. 

SEDGE  POND'S  LOVE  TO  GEAND'mEEE. 

The  turmoil  in  the  village  street  was  concentrated  in 
the  passages  of  the  ale-house.  The  motliest  parties  of 
-women,  as  well  as  of  men,  were  tugging  and  tearing  their 
way  there.  But  even  there,  opportune  little  lanes  opened 
occasionally.  Taking  one  of  these  at  the  moment  it  pre- 
sented itself,  Grand'mere  and  Yolande,  half  walking  and 
half  borne  on  by  the  pressure  around  them,  struggled  up 
the  very  centre  of  the  kitchen  before  their  entrance  was 
called  in  question. 

"Messieurs,"  said  Grand'mere,  suddenly,  in  quavering 
but  gallant  accents,  which  broke  like  a  thunder-clap 
through  the  brawling  and  blustering  of  the  conspirators, 
"  hei'e  I  -am,  and  my  granddaughter  Yolande,  and  my 
stick,  as  you  sought.  It  is  better  that  I  should  come  into 
the  midst  of  you  of  my  own  will,  than  that  you  should  bat- 
ter the  Shottery  Cottage  to  the  ground,  to  the  anger  of  my 
lady  and  the  loss  of  a  new  tenant,  and  only  have  my  body, 
after  all,  like  that  of  a  crushed  rat  from  under  the  stones. 
Here  I  am,  to  give  an  account  of  myself,  with  all  that  in- 
timately belongs  to  me ;  for  you  would  not  abuse  your- 
selves to  punish  the  poor  domestics,  your  own  country- 
women, the  lacquey  of  Monsieur,  your  rector.  What  is 
your  will,  my  friends,  who  call  yourselves  my  enemies  ?" 

Silence  followed  Grand'mere's  appeal,  broken  but  by  the 
rattling  of  mugs  and  cans,  as  foot  nudged  foot,  and  elbow 
jogged  elbow,  and  by  the  rustling  of  shagged  heads,  and 
nodding  of  flushed  faces,  and  the  blast  of  many  breaths 
dra wn  simultaneously. 

"  Dickens,"  even  Master  Swinfen,  the  bragging,  unscru- 
pulous landlord,  found  nothing  farther  to  splutter  out 
"  who'd  e'er  ha'e  thought  it?  What  can  ha'e  brought  the 
women  here,  unless  they  knowed  that  I'd  like  no  hand  laid 
on  them  on  the  premises?  It  aint  in  my  power  to  say 
more ;  but  I  shan't  go  for  to  offer  them  seats." 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  379 

"They've  knowed  that  you'd  not  like  no  wiolence  in 
the  house,  Mat" — his  wife  stuck  out  her  scraggy  neck,  and 
distilled  her  drops  of  vinegar.  "  They  seek  to  som  on 
your  protection,  the  cunning  Jews  ;  but  they've'  been  a-long 
of  coming,  they  and  the  whole  race  of  them — tell  'em  that." 

"Nay,  now," what  a  speerit  be  in  the  witch,"  burst  out 
a  countryman,  in  sheer  extremity  of  wonder,  "  to  think 
she  be  a'dame  like  another,  and  as  old  as  Grandmother ! 
The  speerit  of  Sarten  hissen  mun  be  in  her." 

"  Go !"  Grand'mere  answered  the  observation  with  quick 
wit.  "  I  show  you  your  yellow  beak.  You  read  your 
Scriptures  ill.  '  Resist  the  devil,  and  he  will  flee  from  you,' 
your  Scriptures  say — is  it  not  so  ?  On  the  contrary,  you 
have  resisted  me,  and  behold  I  am  come  among  you." 

As  yet  no  hand  had  been  put  on  Grand'mere  and 
Yolancle,  and  no  challenge  addressed  to  them.  It  seemed 
as  if  this  boldness  and  innocence  would,  by  a  master-stroke 
of  daring  and  confidence,  disarm  their  antagonists,  and  win 
the  day. 

Grand'mere  thought  so,  and  her  Gallic  spirit  rose  high- 
er, and  her  Gallic  tongue  shaped  its  words  anew  into 
ready,  shrewd,  epigrammatic  sentences,  not  suspecting  that 
they  were  so  many  pearls  of  speech  cast  before  swine. 
"  But  why  have  you  gone  to  surround  me,  messieurs,  my 
friends?  What  is  it  that  you  have  to  say  to  me?  It  is 
necessary  that  I  do  not  tap  my  mule  in  vain.  Let  us  clear 
up  the  difference — let  us  examine  into  the  ground  of  dis- 
pute. Here  I  am,  waiting,  dying  of  the  wish  and  the  hope 
to  remove  it — pack  it  up,  and  send  it  away  across  the 
seas.  We  may  dispense  with  the  four  beggars  of  conver- 
sation— the  wind,  the  rain,  the  sun,  the  moon — in  such  cir- 
cumstances, and  strike  to  the  heart  of  the  matter  at  once. 
What  have  I  done  ?" 

"What  ha'e  ye  not  done?"  the  growl  arose,  as  the  swine 
turned  upon  her  to  rend  her,  in  that  deceptive  slowness  of 
thought,  ami  speech,  and  action,  which  first  crawled,  and 
then  leaped,  at  their  conclusion — "  You  and  the  man  of  you 
ha'e  used  us  as  decoys  and  blinds — ha'e  robbed  and  abused 
us.  Where  be  bur  king's  bounty,  that  ye  ha'e  battened 
on  with  your  courts  and  stews,  your  coaches,  your  bro- 
cards,  and  taffities,  while  we  and  the  loikes  of  we  ha'e  been 
morling  and  starving  on  gi-oats  and  in  drugget?     Good 


380  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

enough  for  the  loikcs  of  we,  my  measters ;  while  furrin 
trash,  as  could  never  meet  us  in  fair  fight,  were  a-riding 
ower  our  heads,  and  a-kicking  up  their  heels,  and  a-mock- 
ing  of  us !  And  that  were  not  all ;  but  ye  niun  poke  and 
worm  into  our  willage,  and  castle,  and  rectory — nobbut  our 
pig-stys,  and  larn  all  we  ha'e  and  all  we  do  for  to  tell 
tales  to  base  adventurers,  loike  your  sons  and  swag- 
gering land  and  sea  captains.  And  as  that  were  not  all, 
neither,  and  more  by  a  deal  than  honest  flesh  and  blood 
could  stand,  but  ye  niun  seek  to  pizen  and  play  your  can- 
trips on  us  and  on  our  beasteses  with  your  possets  and 
your  plaisters,  and  your  cussed  wags  and  winks." 

With  each  additional  charge,  the  clenched  hands  rang 
louder  on  the  table ;  the  eyes,  as  they  stared  at  Grand'- 
mere and  Yolande,  widened  and  widened,  until  the  speak- 
ers half  rose,  bent  and  swayed  nearer  to  the  two  women. 

Grand'mere  looked  from  one  blinded,  besotted  face  to 
another,  completely  taken  aback.  "  Do  you  believe  this  ?" 
she  remonstrated  at  last.  "Me  who  wished  only  to  do 
you  good  ?  I  swear  it.  But  how  I  have  deceived  my- 
self!" Her  words  were  unheard,  unheeded.  There  was  a 
rush,  a  sweep  of  hulking  giants,  muddled  with  beer,  fired 
with  gin,  smarting  under  the  galling  burden  of  huge  wrong, 
villi  which  they  had  loaded  themselves.  If  some  of  their 
own  number  had  not  stumbled  and  tripped  up  others,  they 
would  have  borne  down  Grand'mere  and  Yolande,  and 
trodden  them  under  their  iron  heels  on  the  spot.  There 
was  a  scuffle,  a  shriek,  but  there  was  time  to  think  of 
treating  Grand'mere  and  Yolande  in  the  orthodox  fash- 
ion. "Drive  'em  alongst  the  street  where  they  flaunted, 
drive  'em  loike  the  cattle  they  be,  pluck  their  borrowed 
plumes  off  their  false  backs,  duck  'em  among  the  newt 
and  the  fish  they  arc  so  fond  on,  in  their  own  stew — an 
old  harridan  —  a  dulciny  —  hussies  —  thieves  —  traitors — 
furriners !" 

Grand'mere  and  Yolande  were  caught,  hustled,  and 
dragged  toward  the  door.  Master  Swinfen  interposed  no 
farther  to  keep  the  peace  than  to  call  out  in  hypocritical 
solemnity,  "I  takes  all  good  people  to  witness  that  them 
French  Madames  came  into  this  here  house  will  he,nillhe, 
and  that  they  depart  without  thanks  to  me  for  their  dis- 
missal." 


THE    UL'GUEXOT    FAMILY.  381 

"  Amen,"  responded  Mistress  Swinfen  officiously,  in  the 
character  of  a  clerk. 

Grand'mere  prayed  one  imploring  prayer  to  her  perse- 
cutors, "  Are  there  no  fathers  and  mothers  here  to  have 
pity  on  a  young  girl?  You  men  and  women,  whose 
daughters  I — yes,  I  saved  you — is  there  not  one  to  save  my 
child  ?" 

And  Yolande,  in  an  agony,  urged  in  ttirn,  "  Spare 
Grand'mere — the  grey-headed  woman.  We  go  with  you, 
we  do  not  think  to  refuse,  hut  force  her  not  to  move  so 
fast,  she  can  not  walk  like  that.  Have  you  no  old  women 
of  your  own  ?  Think  you  not  to  grow  old  yourselves,  the 
youngest  and  strongest  of  you?" 

There  was  no  retreating.  There  were  only  taunts  of 
"  Where  he  your  own  man,  your  Mounseer,  the  plunderer, 
smuggler,  gallows-hird,  as  cut  and  run  and  left  you  to 
your  deserts? — sure  he  knew  your  price.  Where  he  his 
honor  Master  Lushington,  and  his  worship  Master  Hoad- 
ley,  as  you  beguiled  for  a  season,  and  my  lady's  son,  and 
Master  George,  and  the  rectory  family,  as  you  had  de- 
bauched an'  you  could  ?  Your  grand  friends  bad  as  lief 
not  be  by,  the  day."  The  rough  ribaldry  of  the  men  was 
hideously  travestied  by  the  women  and  the  children.  If 
there  were  any  of  the  inhabitants  of  Sedge  Pond  who 
thought  better  of  what  the  devil  had  tempted  them  to, 
and  drew  back  into  their  houses,  and  looked  out  scared 
and  horrified  at  the  extent  of  their  outrage,  they  were  too 
late  to  do  any  good  by  their  change  of  mind,  and  they 
shrank  from  the  odium  of  expressing  the  change. 

The  two  women  spoke  no  more,  save  to  each  other. 

"The  gutter  is  low,  Yolande,  but  Heaven  is  high." 

"Yes,  Grand'mere,  it  is  very  high — would  that  it  were 
not  so  high !" 

"It  will  soon  be  near,  poor  petite," 

They  prayed  no  more,  save  to  Him  who  can  hear  in  the 
roar  of  the  street  rabble  as  in  the  peace  of  the  best  oratory 
on  a  mountain  side — among  ruthless  assailants  as  among 
rapt  fellow-worshipers. 

After  all,  it  was  only  the  mobbing,  or,  at  the  worst,  the 
ducking  of  two  Huguenot  women,  left  behind  by  their  nat- 
ural protector,  about  the  time  when  prime  ministers — 
Lord  North  for   one — were   rolled  in  the   London    mud. 


382  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

There  was  nothing  grand,  lurid,  or  ghastly,  hardly  any 
thing  picturesque,  in  the  crime  and  its  accessories.  The 
squalid  village  street,  the  stupid,  besotted  smock-frocks,  with 
the  individual  figures  of  Grand'mere  and  Yolande  soon  lost 
in  the  mass,  and  over  all  the  quiet,  pale,  misty  English 
light,  made  up  the  picture.  The  whole  affair  was  like  one 
of  those  commonplace,  e very-day,  drudging  lives,  which  we 
have  all  along  slighted,  till  a  test  is  suddenly  applied,  and 
we  start  back  self-condemned,  self-abased,  and  a  little 
awed,  because  we  had  been  so  near  holy  ground,  and  did 
not  so  much  as  guess  it.  For  what  we  called  common- 
place and  every-day — that  was  our  humanity,  the  drudgery 
was  devotion,  and  the  unobtrusive  stillness  and  cool  color- 
ing were  as  the  effect  of  the  moon's  rays  when  it  calms  and 
tones  down,  as  well  as  purifies  and  glorifies  the  loud, 
glaring  earth.  And  the  test  which  opened  our  sealed  eyes 
was  the  unexpected  ending  of  the  unvalued  lives,  the 
deaths  endured  steadfastly,  and  for  duty's  sake. 

And,  alas  !  though  Yolande  could  make  the  stormy  prog- 
ress, and  hold  the  young  life  which  still  abounded  in  its 
strength  within  her,  the  old  life,  which  had  come  through 
much,  and  borne  a  brave  and  bright  front  to  this  day,  was 
running  out  and  sinking  low,  by  the  time  she  was  pulled, 
jostled,  and  thrust  back  to  Shottery  Cottage,  its  entrance 
gatelcss  now,  its  garden  spoiled,  and  its  pond  a  pool. 

Hours  before  all  this,  the  rector  had  ridden  to  the  Mall 
and  found  that  the  young  squire  had  gone  on  business  to 
Reedham,  where  he  followed,  and  overtook  Mr.  Gage  in 
the  market-place. 

"  I  have  been  across  to  the  Mall  to  see  you,  squire,"  an- 
nounced the  rector. 

And  Caleb  expressed  his  regret  at  having  missed  the 
visit,  wondering  in  his  private  mind  to  what  cause  he 
should  attribute  the  honor  of  so  special  a  call. 

"I  must  have  your  concurrence  to  get  a  detachment  of 
yeomen  to  gallop  over  to  Sedge  Pond.  The  village  is  in 
an  uproar,  and  I  am  no  longer  able  to  bring  the  country 
people  to  reason  single-handed,"  proceeded  the  rector. 

The  season  for  burning  ricks  was  not  come,  but  an  in- 
disl  incl  v  ision  of  doggedly  local  frays  between  village  and 
village  presented  itself  to  Caleb  Gage's  imagination,  and 
he  thought  of  his  father's  object  in  life,  and  the  power  of 


TUB    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  383 

his  nieniory  in  these  parts,  and  fancied  the  remedy  dis- 
proportionate to  the  evil.  He  was  inclined  to  try  other 
means  and  personal  venture  before  proceeding  to  desperate 
blood-letting  and  putting  hi  irons. 

"  Had  we  not  better  ride  over  together,  and  try  a  little 
expostulation  first?  If  we  give  the  wild  set  a  little 
time  to  cool  down,  and  not  come  so  hard  and  fast  upon 
them,  would  it  not  be  better  ?"  suggested  the  young  man. 

"  I  don't  know  what  you  call  coming  hard  and  fast  upon 
them,  sir,  or  how  much  time  you  mean  to  give  to  a  wild 
set  to  wreak  then-  heathen  savageness,"  protested  the  rec- 
tor in  bitter  impatience,  as  he  recalled  his  own  .delusion  of 
saying  "back"  to  the  flood  of  ignorant  prejudice  and  in- 
temperate rage,  and  expecting  to  see  the  proud  waves  re- 
cede at  his  bidding  before  his  prouder  eyes.  "They  are 
my  parishioners,  and  I  should  know  them.  If  we  do  not 
look  sharp,  I  tell  you,  a  pack  of  curs  will  worry  and  throt- 
tle a  few  harmless  sheep  in  the  person  of  the  fine  old 
French  Madame  and  her  family." 

The  rector  had  no  farther  need  to  stir  up  his  hearer. 
The  words  sent  Caleb  Gage,  the  whiter  and  sterner  of  the 
two,  to  demand  the  yeomen  to  be  put  under  the  command 
of  the  rector  and  him.  Nay,  Caleb  Gage  did  not  wish  to 
wait  for  the  astonished  farmers  and  clothworkers  to  put 
themselves  into  their  accoutrements,  so  that  they  might 
start  with  their  jingling  spurs  and  ringing  bridles — he 
would  have  gone  off  like  the  wind  himself  to  cope  with  the 
mob  alone.  It  was  all  that  the  rector  could  do  to  detain 
his  coadjutor  under  assurances  of  the  comparative  immu- 
nity of  Grand'mere  and  her  household  within  Shottery 
Cottage  till  night-fall.  The  rector  wanted  the  weight  of 
the  squire  of  the  Mall's  support  to  stimulate  the  zeal  of  the 
patriotic  yeomen  now  called  out  to  redress  a  public  wrong, 
for  this  was  no  case  of  smashed  machinery  and  invaded 
barns — with  which  native  clothworkers  and  farmers  could 
mutually  sympathize.  It  was  a  mere  brush  at  a  nest  of 
rascally  foreigners,  who  had  already  conic  under  the  ban 
of  the  government ;  so  that  these  English  beef-eaters,  half 
informed  and  hugely  indifferent,  would  have  been  quite 
inclined  to  leave  the  Sedge  Pond  villagers  to  finish  their 
work  without  any  troublesome  interference  on  their  part. 
What  helped  the  rector  was  that  the  question  was  not  • 


384  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

of  marauders  who  might  be  left  to  defend  themselves,  but 
of  a  handful  of  women  ;  and  though  British  gorges  could 
swallow  a  good  deal  in  the  shape  of  devastation  where 
foreigners  were  concerned,  the  most  bull-headed  among 
them  revolted  at  this  mean  morsel. 

Toward  sunset,  while  the  low  beams  of  the  sun  still  fell 
broad  on  Sedge  Pond,  the  rector  and  Caleb  Gage,  with 
their  company  of  yeomen,  clattered  into  the  empty  street. 
The  normal  state  of  the  village  was  so  sluttish  and  squalid 
that  no  additional  mark  of  ill-doing  and  disorder  made 
much  impression  upon  it.  But  the  vacation  of  the  place 
even  by  women  and  children  was  suspicious.  "There  is 
some  mischief  afloat  at  the  jcottage,"  cried  the  rector, 
excitedly,  while  Caleb  Gage's  pale  face  flushed  fiery  red, 
"  but  it  is  impossible  they  can  have  gone  to  extremity." 
The  gap  where  the  garden  gate  had  stood  was  discovered 
the  moment  the  force  came  in  sight  of  the  Shottery  Cot- 
tage, but  the  cottage  itself,  save  for  its  shattered  windows 
and  closed  shutters,  which  the  rector  had  seen  in  the 
morning,  presented  no  change  and  offered  no  sign.  If  the 
convulsive  sobs  of  Black  Jasper,  the  gushing  sighs  and  the 
hollow  groans  of  Prie,  and  the  denunciations  and  vocifera- 
tions of  Deb  to  be  let  out  to  eat  her  words  and  fight  fran- 
tically for  her  old  Madame  and  her  young  Ma'mselle,  were 
resounding  within  the  walls,  they  did  not  reach  the  ears 
of  the  coming  rescuers. 

But  when  the  riders  looked  over  the  garden  wall,  they 
s;i\\r  a  repulsive  sight  enough.  The  little  garden  lay 
before  them  swarming  with  smock-frocks,  not  pressing 
toward  the  house,  but  standing  round  the  fish-pond.  Its 
stone  margin  Avas  shattered,  its  waters  troubled,  and  it 
was  covered  with  circles  and  bells  of  foam.  The  crowd 
was  startled  by  the  measured  beat  of  the  horses'  feet. 
The  clink  and  clash  of  the  riders'  arms  were  sounds  not 
totally  unfamiliar.  Some  of  the  countrymen  present  had 
beard  the  ominous  interlude  when  the  smoke  from  the 
smouldering  cocks  of  hay  and  sheaves  of  corn  was  pollut- 
ing the  fresh  fields.  The  gang,  actors  and  spectators, 
Btopped  the  occupation  on  which  they  had  been  intent, 
and  presented  to  the  yeomen  and  their  leaders  a  small  sea 
of  rabid  faces.  But  the  foremost  figures  did  not*  let  go 
their  two  prisoners.     Two  women,  with  their  clothes  torn 


THE   HUGUEXOT   FAMILY.  385 

and  dripping,  were  seen  standing  and  sinking  down  in  the 
mud.  Murder  might,  ere  now,  have  been  committed  on 
the  principal  offender,  if  one  fierce  and  stalwart  man  had 
taken  upon  him  the  execution  of  the  deed.  But  when  a 
crowd  of  delirious  men  tried  it  all  at  once,  so  that  the 
criminal,  whose  venerable,  feeble  limbs  had  bent  so  often 
to  her  God,  and  to  no  other,  had  to  go  down  several  times 
into  the  water  to  receive  her  last  baptism  of  humiliation 
and  death,  the  business  was  neither  so  mercifully  brief  nor 
thorough. 

Caleb  Gage  at  once  sprang  from  his  horse,  but  the  rec- 
tor sat  at  the  head  of  his  yeomen  and  waved  his  hand, 
delivering  his  orders,  "  Let  go  these  ladies  ;  stop  this  work, 
I  say,  or,  as  sure  as  I  am  a  man  of  peace,  and  an  ordained 
priest,  and  you  the  barbarians  I  have  been  accustomed  to 
call  my  people,  the  yeomen  behind  me  shall  ride  in  and 
cut  down  every  man  of  you!" 

The  scum  of  the  Sedge  Pond  villagers  were  as  far  from 
cowards  as  from  saints.  But  the  instinctive  shrinking  of 
all  disorderly  masses,  from  any  thing  like  a  trained  band, 
governed  by  law  and  duty,  soon  showed  itself.  The 
square  towers  of  yeomen,  sitting  there,  with  frowning 
brows  under  their  helmets,  and  their  hands  clenched  in 
their  gauntlets,  when  they  were  brought  to  close  quarter 
with  so  villainous  a  job  as  this,  held  the  sway  of  masters 
over  laborers. 

The  smock-frocks  fell  back  a  little  with  a  grim,  surly 
awkwardness  of  concession  ;  their  staring,  blood-shot  eyes 
blinking  uneasily  at  the  speaker.  But  before  the  people 
could  do  more,  before  the  piercing  cry  of  Yolande,  "  Mon- 
sieur Caleb  !  Caleb  Gage  !  for  my  sake,  save  Grand'mere !" 
could  reach  Caleb,  Grand'mere  herself  had  heard  the  voice 
of  a  friend,  and  raising  herself  on  the  arms  of  her  jailers 
and  executioners,  who  were  forced  to  hold  her  still  that 
she  might  slide  to  the  ground,  announced  eagerly  in 
accents  audible  enough  for  those  around  her  to  hear, 
"Monsieur  the  rector,  I  am  here,  neither  killed  nor  wound- 
ed ;  slay  nobody  for  me." 

They  were  the  last  coherent  words  which  Grand'mere 
ever  spoke,  she  fell  back  after  the  efforl  and  sank  into 
unconsciousness.  Her  strength  ebbed  rapidly  away  during 
the  hours  that  she  survived,  notwithstanding  that  help  of 

R 


386  THE  HUGUENOT  FAMILY. 

every  sort  was  at  hand.  All  that  remorseful  pity  and  ten- 
derness, all  that  friendship  and  devotion,  could  do,  was 
done.  Carried  into  her  own  house,  laid  on  her  home  bed, 
she  was  lovingly  waited  on  by  her  people  and  her  child. 
The  leech-craft  of  a  country  clergyman  like  the  rector  and 
a  young  squire,  bred  as  Caleb  Gage  had  been,  was  at  her 
service.  The  old  squire's  friend,  the  good  Reedham  doc- 
tor, who  liked  to  attend  by  the  sick-beds  of  the  Methodists 
because  they  died  well,  was  brought  over,  but  he  could 
only  shake  his  head  and  say  that  he  could  do  nothing.  A 
mighty  deal  more  than  he  could  do  had  been  done  for  so 
brave  and  sweet  a  martyr.  Madam  from  the  rectory 
came  to  watch  by  her,  and  Milly  and  Dolly  Rolle  to  weep 
their  eyes  out  for  her ;  and  Mr.  Iloadley  was  here  too,  the 
great  tears  diminishing  the  light  of  his  own  big  black  eyes, 
with  the  injunction,  "  Weep  not  for  the  blessed  dead,  but 
the  miserable  living,"  on  his  tongue.  The  old  Frenchwom- 
an in  her  last  moments  was  looked  on  with  more  yearn- 
ing and  reverence  than  any  lady  or  queen  could  have 
been,  notwithstanding  that  she  died  of  the  maltreatment 
dealt  to  the  lowest  of  her  kind,  and  awarded  to  her  by  the 
men  and  women  among  whom  she  had  dwelt,  and  whom 
she  had  served  with  her  best. 

After  sense  was  gone,  and  while  speech  remained, 
Grand'mere  rambled  characteristically.  Now  her  imagi- 
nation was  full  of  one  of  the  great  hunts  in  her  native  for- 
ests, and  of  the  halili  resounding  through  the  glades  for  a 
royal  boar.  Again  she  was  comforting  her  son  for  her 
fate,  "  I  suffered  it  with  all  my  heart  for  you,  Hubert ;  only 
be  you  ready  for  me."  Then  she  was  recalling  and  sum- 
ming up  promise  after  promise  to  which  she  had  clung, 
and  as  if  they  had  never  failed  her — an  escape  from  the 
windy  storm  and  tempest,  a  tabernacle  to  be  hidden  in 
from  the  strife  of  tongues,  the  hills  to  which  she  would  lift 
her  eyes  and  from  whence  should  come  her  aid.  Grand'- 
m6re's  last  words  were  to  Yolande,  "  But,  paumette,  it  is 
well — wTait." 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  387 


CHAPTER  XXXV. 

MEN'S   WATS   AND    GOD'S   WAYS. 

Every  body  was  sorry  for  Yolande.  Every  body  was 
good  to  her.  It  was  as  if  the  electricity  long  latent  in  a 
sultry  atmosphere  had  exhausted  itself  in  a  great  storm, 
and  the  air  was  not  only  clear  and  fresh  at  last,  but  the 
sun,  and  the  south  wind,  and  the  soft  rain  were  all  fain  to 
lift  up,  refresh,  and  restore  the  beaten-down,  broken  herb- 
age. It  was  as  if  the  world  had  suddenly  become  aware 
of  a  great  debt  incumbent  on  it  to  pay,  and  Yolande  the 
sole  creditor — a  great  amends  to  make,  and  she  the  only 
receiver. 

True,  there  were  hulking,  creeping  figures  of  men  and 
women,  who  turned  into  their  houses,  and  skulked  behind 
their  doors  in  the  summer  sunshine,  when  Yolande  passed 
along.  There  were  men  and  women  who  removed  from 
Sedge  Pond,  and  betook  themselves  to  other  localities,  un- 
able to  bear  the  silent  reproach  of  the  simple  presence  of 
one  who  was  more  forlorn  than  an  orphan  among  them. 
And  these  whilom  villagers,  carrying  their  consciences  full 
of  perilous  stuff,  went  from  bad  to  worse,  and  waxed  rep- 
robate. But,  as  a  rule,  the  remorse  of  Sedge  Pond  for  the 
consummation  of  wrong  to  the  Dupuys,  took  the  turn  of 
repentance. 

"  Nay,  them  weren't  so  bad  as  they  were  called,  not  by 
along  chalk,"  the  village  worthies  assured  each  other,  lirst 
sneakingly  and  then  boldly,  with  rueful  shakes  of  the  head 
and  compunctious  groans.  "They  wouldn'1  ha'e  been  so 
game  when  they  came  to  be  mauled.  We're  tree  to  bet 
they  be  of  the  right  sort  as  h:is  that  kind  of  might  of  pa- 
tience— ne'er  a  squale  nor  a  curse  atween  the  two.  Nay, 
but  eh  !  Lord  !  her  as  was  done  for  bath'  Pearson  hold  yeo- 
men's Bwords.  Heard  ye  that,  lads?  And  it  were  gospel 
that  her  were  cruel  kind  to  we  in  the  sickness  Long  Bince. 
How  could  we  go  to  try  what  we  did?  We  oughl  to  be 
black  ashamed  of  ourselves,  forever  and  a  day  ;"  and  deep 


38S  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

shame,  softened  by  a  wish  to  do  better,  broke  the  hard 
hearts  of  the  villagers. 

The  old  autocracy  of  the  ale-house  came  rapidly  down, 
until  the  ale-house  itself  reformed,  and  its  worst  features 
were  blotted  out  by  universal  consent. 

AVith  the  family  at  the  rectory  Yolande  in  her  desolation 
found  a  temporary  shelter,  and  Madam  coddled  her  as  a 
child  of  her  own ;  for  Grand'mere  had  been  good  to 
Madam's  Milly  in  her  trouble,  the  Milly  who  had  come  well 
through  it  all,  and  was  soon  to  be  the  honored  wife  of  a 
young  clergyman.  The  couple  were  preparing  to  set  up 
house  together  at  the  Corner  Farm,  and  would  fain  have 
begged,  borrowed,  or  stolen  Yolande  as  a  guest,  to  whom 
hospitality  was  a  sacred  duty,  and  the  entertainment  of 
whom  would  bring  a  blessing  with  it ;  while  the  squire  of 
the  Mall  would  have  given  his  life  to  have  afforded  her 
another  and  a  lasting  refuge.  And  seeing  that  Milly  and 
Mr.  Hoadley  were  showing  other  young  people  so  good  an 
example,  it  did  not  seem  as  if  it  would  have  been  unnatural 
or  unbecoming  in  the  circumstances,  had  Yolande  Dupuy, 
submitting  to  what  were  at  last  the  well-known  and  ac- 
credited wishes  of  the  squire,  laid  aside  her  mourning,  for 
one  day,  and  made  one  visit  to  the  Sedge  Pond  church, 
thus  providing  two  sweet  and  serious-minded  brides  in- 
stead of  one.  In  this  case  it  was  judged  correctly  that 
Monsieur  and  Madame,  from  their  remote  Huguenot  refuge 
in  the  Americas,  compelled  as  they  were  to  bow  to  the 
most  terrible  blow  which  could  have  befallen  them,  would 
acquiesce  thankfully  in  the  completion  of  the  settlement 
which  Grand'mere  had  herself  proposed  for  her  child. 

Prie  and  Deb,  persuaded  that  they  had  received  a  last 
commission  to  this  effect  from  Grand'mere,  were  proposing 
to  follow  Yolande's  fortunes  wherever  her  wandering  foot- 
steps might  lead  her.  Even  Black  Jasper,  holding  always 
his  main  duty  to  the  rectory  family,  hovered,  like  a  mem- 
ber of  Yolande's  staff — far  from  unattached  in  the  sense 
of  the  affections — round  the  grandchild  of  the  beautiful 
old  lady  who  had  noticed  him  and  been  kind  to  him,  and 
a\  hose  name  he  could  no  more  mention  without  a  copious 
effusion  of  grateful  and  enthusiastic  tears,  than  he  could 
mention  thai  of  Captain  Philip  without  the  characteristic 
tribute.     And  there  was  this  other  point  of  union  between 


THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  389 

Black  Jasper  and  Tolande,  that  while  the  soft  fellow  had 
picked  up  an  acquired  taste  for  a  quality  at  the  moral  an- 
tipodes to  his  own — the  severe  criticism  of  Deb  Potts — he 
had  at  the  same  time  an  immense  sympathy  with  Ma'mselle, 
whom  he  regarded  as  under  a  perpetual  exposure  to  this 
rasping,  ruffling  influence. 

Yolande  was  made  more  of  than  she  had  ever  been  be- 
fore. The  very  weather  petted  her,  for  the  tardy,  fitful 
spring  burst  into  a  serenely  beautiful  summer,  with  a  ra- 
diance and  exuberance  tempered  as  if  to  meet  the  needs  of 
aching  hearts  and  weary  eyes.  Yet,  underlying  all  the 
loving-kindness  which  God  and  man  lavished  upon  her, 
there  was  a  piteousness,  which  Yolande  put  away  from  her 
sometimes,  wringing  her  hands  because  it  only  gave  her  a 
deeper  realization,  a  fuller  comprehension  of  the  extent  of 
her  loss. 

"  Oh  !  my  friends,  do  not  have  such  pity  for  me  !  Xeg- 
lect,  thwart,  blame  me  as  formerly,  and  then  I  shall  not, 
on  all  sides,  in  every  beating  of  my  heart,  feel  that  Grand'- 
mere is  gone  forever  from  this  world.  You  are  very  good, 
but  none  of  you,  nor  the  earth,  nor  the  sky,  is  Grand'mere. 
Yes,  I  know  it  well,  she  is  a  glorified  spirit ;  but  I — I  am, 
and  maybe  for  as  long  a  time  as  she  was  in  the  body,  only 
a  poor,  weak,  sinful,  mortal  woman.  I  did  every  thing  with 
Grand'mere — I  was  always  with  Grand'mere.  You  can 
not  think,  you  good  people,  who  live  simply  for  God  and 
your  fellow-creatures,  and  are  otherwise  sen-sufficing  and 
independent,  or  who  have  your  hearts  spread  over  many 
friends — how  I  shiver  in  my  loneliness,  and  shriek  in  my 
mutilation,  even  though  He  be  with  us  in  His  grace  alway 
to  the  end  of  the  world." 

Yes,  Yolande  needed  every  solace  to  bring  her  back  to 
life,  for  was  she  not  bereft  indeed  ?  It  bcl<  mged  I  <  i  her  na- 
ture that  in  the  comparative  negation  of  a  French  girl's 
personality,  she  had  been  bound  up  in  Grand'mere — that. 
she  had  lived  a  dual  and  not  a  single  life — that  in  almosl 
every  thing  she  had  been  associated  and  identified  with 
the  noble  and  sweet  old  woman  who  was  gone  to  kindred 
spirits;  and  that  not  even  her  attachment  to  Caleh  Gage, 
visionary  and  romantic  as  it  had  been,  had  broken  the 
union.  Therefore,  though  5Tolande  was  godly,  reverent, 
true,  tender,  a  fair  scholar  in  Grand'mere's  school  of  meek- 


390  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

ness,  and  a  daughter  and  heiress  of  Grand'mere's  in  the 
gii't  of  wide  sympathy  and  inexhaustible  hopefulness,  she 
could  not  help  feeling  as  if  part  of  her  nature  was  at  once 
buried  in  the  earth  and  flown  to  the  skies — as  if  there  was 
a  yawning  chasm  always  open  before  her  feet,  with  the 
blue  distance  a  complete  blank.  She  sickened  in  spirit, 
and  drooped  in  heart  and  mind,  and  wore  black  in  soul  as 
well  as  in  body  for  the  earthly,  human  deprivation  of 
Grand'niere  until  her  friends  feared  for  her,  that  she  would 
not  recover  from  the  blow  and  loss,  but  would  wither  un- 
der them,  if  not  die,  a  martyr  to  natural  affection,  which  is 
liable  to  weakness  and  morbidness  in  its  anguish,  for  the 
very  reason  that  it  is  less  than  divine ;  and  so  men,  not 
God  (thank  Heaven,  never  God!),  call  it  idolatry. 

"  After  all  that  has  been  said,  to  make  no  farther  way — 
it  is  very  disheartening.  I  declare,  I  am  afraid  it  is  a  bad 
job." 

"Then,  sir,  I  conclude  you  think  I  had  better  give  it 
up  ?" 

The  speakers  were  the  rector  and  Squire  Gage,  who  had 
fraternized  to  such  an  extent  lately,  that  the  rector  had 
just  arrested  the  squire,  a  little  against  his  will,  on  his 
road  to  the  rectory,  and  set  him  down  at  the  table  which, 
in  line  weather,  stood  over  against  the  holly-hedge,  where 
the  rector  was  wont  to  smoke  his  afternoon  pipe,  and  drink 
his  glass  of  claret  or  Madeira,  and  study  his  fortnightly 
newspaper  and  his  correspondence.  And  here  Madam 
would  bring  her  fine  stitching,  and  be  informed  and  en- 
lightened by  her  lord  and  master  on  whatever  matters  of 
public  or  parish  interest  he  should  judge  to  be  within  her 
capacity.  This  was  the  age  for  men  reading  to  women; 
and  whatever  ideas,  outside  the  women's  private  experi- 
ence, gol  into  their  heads,  and  simmered  and  made  little 
ebullitions  from  these  thinly-tenanted  settlements,  they 
had  the  men  to  thank  or  to  blame  for  them. 

It  a\;i^  Buch  a  day  as  that  on  which  Grand'mere  and  the 
Sedge  Pond  villagers  had  had  their  last  encounter,  and  put 
tin-  final  seal  to  their  intercourse.  Only  the  silvery  light 
of  spring  had  become  the  golden  light  of  summer.  For 
dim,  blue,  scentless  periwinkles  in  dark  green  ivy,  there 
were  now  vivid  roses,  heavy  with  all  sweetness  in  the  rich 
■  i    of  their  l<  orange  flame  of  lilies,  ripe    oaten 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  391 

straws  and  honeysuckle,  and  nothing  cold  but  the  blos- 
soms of  the  jessamine,  which  show  among  companion 
flowers  like  stars  seen  by  day,  and  which  need  a  back- 
ground of  night  or  age  to  bring  out  their  purity,  peaceful- 
ness,  trustfulness. 

All  over  the  meads  and  the  uplands,  the  castle  woods 
and  the  very  Waaste — which  Caleb  Gage  knew  and  loved 
with  a  power  and  intensity  of  appreciation  which  is  like  an 
additional  faculty  of  soul  and  charm  of  existence  to  some 
men  and  women — there  were  the  same  seasonable  efflores- 
cence and  bounty  for  beast,  and  bird,  and  insect.  Herds 
standing  in  the  river  lowed,  and  flocks  on  the  wing  war- 
bled and  sang,  and  bees  hummed,  filling  the  great  plain 
and  the  whole  row  of  hives  with  the  murmur  of  the  sea, 
as  if  all  nature  united,  and  did  well  to  unite,  and  say,  that 
the  winter  was  gone  and  the  summer  was  come,  and  it  de- 
pended on  God  to  repair  the  breaches  of  the  past,  and  give 
back  what  was  lost  in  the  future.  For  though  Captain 
Philip  had  been  shot  at  Ticonderoga,  and  Grand  mere  done 
to  death  in  the  village  street,  they  but  slept  the  sleep  of 
the  justified,  to  awake  and  rise  again  in  the  fullness  of  life, 
at  the  restitution  and  fruition  of  all  things.  It  was  inani- 
mate nature,  and  nature  in  the  lower  animals,  which  were 
first  resigned  to  this  travail,  and  afterward  content,  even 
ravished.  Humanity  came  last,  where  it  was  resigned  at 
all.  As  for  the  rector's  words,  which  had  rather  been  a  re- 
flection spoken  aloud,  than  a  speech  addressed  to  his  friend, 
they  sounded  nearer  pettish  despair.  Mr.  Philip  Rolle 
Btarted  at  their  instant  application, and  laughed  a  little. 

"  I  did  not  mean  your  suit,"  he  exclaimed,  "  I  meant  the 
spiritual  condition  of  my  parish — mine,  which  if  any  man 
invaded  during  the  last*  five-and-twenty  years,  I  held  him 
as  a  moral  and  spiritual  poacher,  an  unauthorized  social 
depredator.  And  the  end  on't  is,  that  after  holding  forth 
in  the  church  for  a  good  quarter  of  a  century,  baptizing, 
marrying,  burying,  1  have  lived  to  lead  a  detachment  of 
yeomanry  to  put  down — too  late  to  prevent  —  the  most 
craven  atrocity  perpetrated  in  my  time." 

"I  Suppose  all  men  are  alike  in  doing  their  work  after 
fashions  which  they  lit  tie  expected  \<>  follow ?"  replied  Ca- 
leb-, with  a  smothered  sigh  of  relief  "Who  would  have 
said  to  John  Wesley — Mr.  John,  as  my  father  used  to  call 


392  THE    HUGUEXOT   FAMILY. 

him — when  he  was  the  honored  Fellow  of  an  Oxford  col- 
lege, or  to  his  father  before  him,  when  he  was  one  of  the 
most  loyal  clergymen  of  the  Church  of  England,  that  the 
day  would  come  when,  standing  on  his  father's  tombstone, 
because  the  son  was  forbidden  admittance  to  the  church 
where  his  own  brother-in-law  officiated,  the  learned  scholar 
and  punctilious  priest  should  exhort  thousands  of  lawless 
disciples  ?" 

"  I  should  not  have  said  it,  certainly,"  accorded  Mr.  Phil- 
ip Rolle,  a  little  stiffly,  and  hastened  to  go  on.  "  And  I 
suppose  my  dear  old  Madame  could  never  have  guessed 
the  ignominy  and  cruelty  which  we  had  in  store  for  her, 
else  she  would  have  gone  with  her  precious  son.  Now 
that  we  have  made  an  end  of  her,  and  see  her  and  her 
task  in  the  clearness  of  a  history  that  is  finished — good 
Lord !  what  a  devout,  generous  soul !  what  a  magnani- 
mous, gentle  life  was  hers  !  If  Lushington  vows  in  the 
open  market  that  the  horrid  crime  is  enough  to  make  him 
shut  the  '  Rolle  Arms,'  what  can  I  do  with  the  church 
here  ?" 

"  "What  will  you  think  of  me,  sir,"  asked  Caleb  Gage  in 
return,  in  the  sternness  of  self-condemnation,  "  when  I  tell 
you  that  in  spite  of  my  father's  remonstrances,  I  saw  noth- 
ing in  old  Madame  Dupuy  but  the  traces  of  a  meddle- 
some, affected,  fantastic  old  woman,  till  I  had  offended  her 
so  grievously  that  I  could  not  presume  to  intrude  into  her 
presence.     I  can  believe,  now,  how  like  Yolande  she  was." 

"  Or,  rather,  where  Yolande  got  her  fine  qualities  from," 
the  rector  corrected  him.  "You  were  hugely  wrong  in 
your  first  opinion.  In  spite  of  Grand'mere's  French  acute- 
ness  and  fineness  of  tact,  she  was  the  most  gnileless  old 
Avoman  I  ever  knew.  She  could  not  credit  the  bitter  bad- 
ness df  evil — witness  how  the  quality-  of  my  kindred,  to 
their  shame  be  it  spoken, had  her  undone;  she  was  the 
<!<verest  of  the  set — cleverer  even  than  my  lady;  but  they 
go1  the  better  of  her  whenever  they  sought  to  do  it,  and 
always  would,  in  a  way.  This  moan  for  her  is  easily  made, 
too" — and  the  rector, in  his  exasperation, took  a  letter  of 
my  lady's  from  his  pocket,  and  read  out  a  passage  of  it — 

•So  the  bourgeoisie  De  Sevigne  has  been  mobbed  and 
trodden  ou1  of  this  world.  I  may  be  wrong,  but  I  think 
the  original  was  better  bred,  and  would  have  stood  more 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  '    393 

misusage.  I  should  like  to  see  the  mob  who  would  mal- 
treat me.  But  I  don't  deny  that  it  was  a  monstrously 
shocking  end.  How  could  the  Sedge  Pond  villagers  bring 
it  about  to  the  beautiful  old  woman  ?  Only,  you  know, 
Philip,  that  she  went  in  for  being  an  enthusiast  and  a  saint, 
which  was  working  for  the  persecution  that  befell  her." 
The  rector  crumpled  up  the  letter,  and  read  no  farther, 
although  Lady  Rolle  had  written  on  boldly,  "  Whatever 
punishment  I  may  meet,  I  never  pretended  to  be  any  better 
than  my  neighbors.  And  I  am  growing  an  old  woman  now, 
with  my  very  sons  turning  upon  me.  There's  George  on 
the  top  of  his  marriage  with  that  woman,  Gerty  Lowndes, 
though  he  knows  that  I'll  never  speak  to  one  or  t'other 
of  them  after  it.  For  the  fox  and  wolf,  Heneage,  he  would 
fain  rout  me  out  of  the  shoes  he  wants  to  fill;  but  he  shan't 
while  there  is  breath  in  my  body,  and  I'll  keep  it  there  as 
long  as  I  can,  to  spite  my  dutiful  son.  These  are  my 
wages,  and  Grand'mere,  poor  wretch,  had  hers  ;  that  is  all 
there  is  to  be  said." 

In  the  mean  time,  the  rector  was  re-filling  his  pipe,  and 
making  an  apology,  "  I  beg  your  pardon,  my  good  fellow, 
if  I  don't  seem  to  sympathize  with  your  contrition.  I 
must  say  that  your  lamentable  mistake  is  rather  a  consol- 
atory fact  to  a  hot-headed,  high-handed  old  sinner  like  my- 
self, being,  as  it  is,  a  crying  instance  of  how  good  people 
misread  and  villify  each  other's  credentials.  We  musl 
wait  for  the  light  of  another  world  to  spell  them  out  cor- 
rectly, and  to  consent  freely  to  range  ourselves  in  the  same 
company.  Even  death,  opening  the  door  for  a  moment, 
helps  us,"  echoed  the  rector,  pricked  in  his  conscience  by 
the  recollection  of  how  long  the  good  squire  of  the  Mall 
had  been  to  him  as  a  heathen,  and  how  he  bad  needed,  he- 
fore  he  could  feel  his  obstinate  hostility  melting  away,  to 
go  to  the  squire's  funeral  feast,  see  with  his  own  eyes  the 
good  works  which  should  follow  the  dead  man.  where  no 
other  possessions  could  rind  a  place;  hear  the  widow-,  the 
orphans,  and  the  outcast  weeping,  and  telling  \\  hal  Squire 
Gage  had  done  for  them;  grasp  the  hand  of  the  chief 
mourner,  and  think  of  his  own  son  Philip,  who  was  spared 
mourning  for  him. 

"But  you  had  as  lief  keep  your  own  counsel  <>n  this  lit- 
tle matter,"  added  the  rector  after  a  pause.     "  It  is  a  niar- 

R  2 


394    '  THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 


vol  that  poor  Yolande  can  abide  the  sight  of  any  of  us,  or 
of  the  very  houses  and  fields  even.  For  her  sake,  as  well 
as  yours,  my  friend,  I  should  be  right  glad  to  speed  your 


mig." 


"  I  believe  you  would  ;  and  I  am  more  obliged  for  that 
than  for  any  other  token  of  your  regard,"  acknowledged 
Caleb  ;  "  but  I  must  tell  you  I  mean  to  tell  every  thing  to 
Yolande,"  he  declared  steadily. 

The  rector  looked  askance  at  the  step. 

"  What !  wound  a  poor  thhig  wounded  already,  in  what 
looks  like  mere  wantonness  and  fatality  —  damage  your 
own  cause,  for  no  purpose  but  to  satisfy  some  overstrain- 
ed scruple,  selfish  in  its  origin  and  effect.  Pardon  me, 
squire,  I  thought  you  had  more  common  sense  and  self- 
mastery.  However,  you  are  at  liberty  to  manage  your 
own  affair  as  you  think  proper.  You  ought  to  know,  and 
I  dare  say  the  women  would  say  that  I  was  a  sorry  ad- 
viser in  such  a  case,"  he  broke  off,  with  a  shrug  of  his 
shoulders. 

"  You  have  given  me  good  advice  before  now ;  you  have 
been  a  good  friend  to  me  and  to  Yolande,  which  is  far 
more,  sir.  But  I  can  not  help  telling  her  every  thing.  It 
may  have  been  my  father's  way  with  my  mother;  or  I  may 
have  learned  the  trick  from  long  listening  to  what  he  never 
passed  a  day  without  alluding  to.  No  one  could  live  with 
my  father  and  not  hear  of  his  first  and  best  friend.  I  don't 
think  I  have  much  chance.  I  fancy  Yolande  is  only  wait- 
ing for  the  opportunity  of  joining  her  father  and  her  moth- 
er, and  not  caring  much  even  for  that.  I  know  it  is  not 
quite  right  in  her,  but  only  consider  how  fond  she  was  of 
the  old  woman  whom  you  describe  as  a  saint  as  well  as  a 
martyr,  and  how  she  was  deprived  of  her.  Yet  I  don't  sup- 
pose Yolande  hates  any  of  us — least  of  all  the  place  where 
her  friend's  body  is  laid  to  rest.  And  though  she  cares  for 
the  dust,  she  could  leave  it,  because,  as  it  was  put  into  the 
garner  without  will  and  power  of  hers,  so  it  can  not  suffer 
farther  desecration  or  be  lost,  though  it  should  be  scatter- 
ed to  the  four  winds.  Yolande  will  never  have  any  man 
for  her  husband,  or  consent  to  fill  any  relation  in  life  for 
which  Bhe  does  not  care ;  and  she  has  no  feeling  except  wea- 
riness. Bui  even  though  I  ran  ten  times  more  risk,  I  can 
not  help  it — I  must  confess  to  Yolande  my  brutal  preju- 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  395 

dice,  dullness,  and  doggedness,  and  what  they  cost  me. 
Perhaps,"  he  added,  with  a  desperate  sigh,  "  after  she  hears 
me,  she  will  not  wonder  so  much  that  there  were  caitiffs 
and  murderers  in  Sedge  Pond  who  could  lift  their  hands 
against  such  women ;  and  for  our  very  lowness  and  loss 
she  may  pity  us." 

"  You  are  infected,  man,"  represented  the  rector.  "  I 
don't  mean  to  say  that  you  are  not  upright  and  honorable, 
a  very  good  neighbor  and  squire,  and  a  member  of  my 
church  of  whom  I  may  be  proud,  and  from  whom  I  may  re- 
ceive a  lesson  ;  but  I  protest  all  the  same  that  you  are  in- 
fected with  ultra-liberal  and  Quixotic  notions.  Madam 
Gage  —  if  you  get  her  —  will  be  lifted  clean  out  of  her 
sphere,  and  have  her  head  turned — luckily  it  is  a  notably 
reasonable  head  for  a  woman,  like  that  of  her  poor  blessed 
Grand'mere.  As  you  are  determined  to  cut  your  own 
throat,  as  the  saying  is,  the  next  thing  is  to  provide  you 
with  as  many  occasions  for  the  deed  as  possible,  and  send 
you  at  once  to  the  silly  girls  in  the  garden — hey  ?"  sug- 
gested the  rector,  not  much  shaken  in  his  conviction  that 
Caleb,  in  his  infatuation,  was  going  the  road  to  ruin  his 
prospects  with  Yolande — provoked  at  it,  too,  sorry  for  it, 
yet  somehow  feeling  called  upon,  as  the  kindest  of  human 
creatures  feel  in  their  neighbors'  concerns  of  this  descrip- 
tion, to  turn  round  and  make  a  joke  of  this  alone  of  all 
troubles. 

Caleb  could  not  see  the  propriety  of  the  joke,  but  he  ac- 
cepted the  rector's  invitation,  and  went  to  seek  the  girls 
and  his  fate  in  the  rectory  garden. 

Caleb  Gage  had  become  more  familiar  with  girls  than 
when  he  sat  first  with  Yolande  in  the  Shottcry  Cottage 
parlor,  and  mistook  her  shyness  for  pride,  her  fine  intelli- 
gence and  natural  attainments  for  pedantry  and  French 
polish.  But  he  had  not  lost,  and  would  never  lose  his  habit 
of  thinking  of  girls  as  his  sisters,  who  might  have  grown  tip 
with  him,  and  brightened  and  beautified  indefinitely  wh.it 
had  not  been  an  unhappy  and  unsocial  youth  at  the  Mall. 
He  could  not  help  remarking  now  how  the  rectory  girls  he- 
came  the  rectory  garden,  and  seemed  to  fall  into  their  prop- 
er places  among  its  sunny  sloping  strawberry  banks,  its 
shady  miniature  orchards,  its  aromatic  herb-beds,  and  its 
tufts  of  honest,  sweet  old  English  flowers,  with  character- 


396  THE   HUGUENOT   FAMILY. 

istic  English  names,  from  Sweet  "William  to  heart's-ease, 
which,  instead  of  disdaining  their  humble  surroundings, 
flourished  amazingly  in  them.  Caleb  built  a  castle  in  the, 
air  of  the  restoration  of  the  Mall  garden,  and  then  thought 
how  not  only  one  corner  formally  set  apart  for  an  Eden, 
but  the  whole  Mall  would  prove  a  wilderness  if  he  did  not 
win  the  Eve  he  sought. 

Milly  and  Dolly  Kolle  were  superintending  Black  Jas- 
per pulling  cherries — cherries  themselves,  the  two  girls,  in 
their  buxom  bloom;  while  Black  Jasper,  on  his  ladder, 
Avas  like  a  huge  black  plum.  The  girls  stood  at  the  foot 
of  the  tree,  and  every  riper,  more  tempting  bunch  than  an- 
other, Milly  confiscated  for  the  best-behaved  children  in 
Mr.  Hoadley's  new  school ;  and  if  any  regard  for  Mr. 
Hoadley's  gratification  and  gratitude  was  included  in  the 
gift,  Grand  mere  would  not  have  held  that  its  merit  was 
therefore  impaired,  Dolly  contented  herself  with  a  heap 
of  rose  leaves,  and  a  sheaf  of  lavender  to  add  to  Madam's 
stores. 

Yolande  had  not  spirit  or  strength  even  for  such  light 
employments,  and  had  crept  aAvay  to  the  mossy  alcove  in 
the  wall,  where,  leaning  back  against  the  dank,  hoary 
stones,  she  looked  as  fair  and  pale  as  the  chaste  glimmer 
of  the  jasmine  stars  amid  the  gloom  of  their  setting  of 
leaves,  while  her  once  busy  hands,  crossed  listlessly  in  her 
lap,  showed  as  shady  in  their  slenderness,  as  if  they  were 
bathed  in  moonshine. 

Caleb  Gage  did  not  join  Yolande  to  chide  her — to  re- 
mind her  that  there  was  still  work  in  the  world  for  her  to 
do — to  call  her  to  account  for  questioning  the  decrees  of 
God,  and  resisting  His  will,  lie  did  not  understand  in 
this  sense  "a time  to  mourn"  with  Yolande,  when  she  was 
stricken  in  the  tenderest  affections  which  had  grown  with 
her  growth.  Besides,  Mr.  Iloadley  took  this  mission  on 
himself,  and  although  Yolande  invariably  recognized  his 
excellent  intentions,  and  would  grant  to  him  at  the  end  of 
his  lectures,  "Yes,  I  am  egoiste,  or  my  heart  would  not 
ache  so;  but  it  is  my  heart  and  my  sorrow,  and  I  can  not 
make  them  other  than  they  are.  You — you  were  Grand'- 
mere's  friend — that  contains  all;  you  are  good  to  speak 
thus  to  me,  and  I  am  here  to  listen." 

But  it  did  not  seem  that  Yolande  was  much  benefited 


THE   HUGUENOT    FAMILY.  397 

in  other  respects  by  Mr.  Hoadley's  eagerness  in  undertak- 
ing to  enter  into  every  heart's  bitterness,  and  to  reconcile 
the  whole  world  in  tribulation  to  the  extent  of  its  depriva- 
tions. 

Caleb  Gage  was  not  impatient  of  Yolande's  grief;  he 
did  not  wish  to  sap  the  tender  fidelity  in  friendship  of  the 
woman  he  cared  for  by  seeking  to  put  it  away  from  her. 
By  his  own  experience  he  would  have  judged  that  the 
most  dishonoring  to  God  and  to  her  of  all  the  modes  which 
even  good  people  have  invented  of  dealing  with  sorrow. 
"Sorrow  not  without  hope" — that  he  could  say;  and 
Yolande  did  not  sorrow  without  hope,  in  the  dreary  vast 
void  of  unbelief,  or  the  ghostly  death-in-life  of  despair. 
Neither  did  she  refuse  to  say,  "  It  is  the  Lord,  let  Him  do 
what  seemeth  to  Him  good !"  Only  she  could  not  see  why 
He .  did  it,  and  the  deed,  in  its  mystery  of  righteousness 
and  mercy,  was  none  the  less  a  deed  of  anguish.  And  she 
did  sorrow.  Grand'mere  had  been  brother  and  sister,  as 
well  as  old  mother  to  her,  and  without  her  sorrow  she 
would  have  been  faithless  alike  to  Grand'mere  and  herself. 
And  Grand'mere  was  violently  taken  from  her  by  that 
stroke  with  which,  at  its  gentlest,  no  repetition  makes 
us  familiar;  which  is  still  as  awful  a  miracle  as  when  it  si- 
lenced the  tongue,  stiffened  the  limbs,  and  reft  the  soul 
from  Abel,  carrying  it  into  that  unseen,  unheard,  unfelt 
world,  before  the  unfathomableness  of  which,  had  not  the 
Son  of  Man  returned  from  it,  and  had  not  the  dim  fore- 
shadowing of  His  return  stretched  through  all  the  ages  be- 
fore  Him,  as  the  narrative  of  His  return,  written  in  letters 
of  heavenly  fire, illuminates  the  darkness  after  Him — hearts 
must  have  hardened  into  stone,  or  groveled  in  brutality. 

Caleb  wanted  to  share  Yolande's  sorrow,  to  cherish  it, 
train  it,  lift  it  to  endure,  for  time  and  eternity,  a  brighter 
and  holier  joy.  He  was  welcome  to  sit  with  her  and  talk 
to  her  of  Grand'mere — more  welcome  and  more  prized 
than,  in  her  present  state,  she  could  comprehend;  and  she 
only  marked  the  fact  by  being  a  little  less  outwardly 
grateful  to  him  than  to  others,  a  little  Less  careful  of  tres- 
passing on  his  kindness. 

"This  time  last  year  Grand'mere  and  me,  we  did  such  a 
thing  together,  Monsieur" — Yolande  was  making  her  moan 
— "and  it  is   not  only  that  we  shall  never  t]o  the  sa 


398  THE  HUGUEXOT  FAMILY. 

thing  again,  "but  that  all  the  occasions  on  which  we  did  it 
before  seem  somehow  shivered  in  their  reality,  and  steeped 
in  tears,  so  that  I  can  not  sometimes  quite  believe  that 
such  events  happened  at  all — that  I  did  not  dream  them, 
as  I  dream  of  Grand'rnere  now,  and  wake  and  find  her 
image  a  dream ;  or  that  she  and  I  conld  ever  have  been 
joyous  and  full  of  confidence  together,  when  we  knew  al- 
ways that  one  day  we  must  part,  and  might  walk  asunder 
in  different  worlds,  for  long  years.  It  is  not  only  the  fu- 
ture which  is  taken  from  me,  but  the  past  also.  Monsieur, 
I  feel  myself  not  only  a  shattered  wreck  of  what  I  was, 
but  a  phantom  among  other  phantoms,  whose  blindness  is 
such  that  we  do  not  know  till  the  crash  comes,  and  the  in- 
conceivable change  has  passed  over  our  circle,  that  we  are 
no  more  than  so  many  phantoms." 

"There  was  one  who  dwelt  among  us,"  Caleb  told  the 
sorrow-laden  girl,  "who  went  and  came  again  on  that 
journey  from  which  none  of  us  comes  back,  and  His  com- 
mand was  to  touch  Him,  and  feel  that  He  had  flesh  and 
bones  as  we  have.  He  was  not  a  phantom  first  or  last ; 
and  neither  are  we  spectres,  whether  we  exist  body  and 
spirit,  or  in  the  spirit  alone.  It  is  all  reality  there  as  well 
as  here.  Now,  you  doubt  the  reality  of  the  latter,  because 
you  can  no  longer  demonstrate  to  yourself  the  reality  of 
the  former.  If  you  reasoned  by  an  inverse  and  truer  proc- 
ess, what  you  have  known  should  prove  to  you  what  you 
do  not  know.  But,  Mademoiselle  Yolande,  while  you 
grieve  for  Grand'mere,  with  whom  you  had  such  com- 
munion as  I  think  I  can  understand,  do  you  never  think 
what  it  would  have  been  had  you  lived  like  a  stranger  to 
her? — had  you  shown  her  no  regard,  and  had  no  happiness 
in  which  she  had  borne  a  part,  till  you  discovered  too  late 
what  you  two  might  have  been  to  each  other?" 

"  Oh !  you  do  not  know !"  cried  Yolande  brokenly,  think- 
ing of  the  day  when  Grand'mere  had  said  to  her,  "Even 
you  and  I, petite,  when  we  shall  be  separated,  we  shall  see 
chambers  in  cadi  other's  hearts  which  we  did  not  enter, 
doors  which  we  did  not  open,  vows  which  wre  did  not  pay." 

"But  I  do  know,"  Caleb  Gage  interrupted  her  hastily; 
"I  misunderstood,  undervalued  Grand'mere.  You  must 
have  known  this,  and  condemned  me  for  it,  Yolande." 

Yolande  looked  at  him  and  shook  her  head.    "  How  could 


THE    HUGUENOT   FAMILY.  399 

I,  when  she  did  not  condemn  you?  Sans  doutef  it  -was 
quite  another  thing  from  your  misunderstanding  and  un- 
dervaluing me  ;  but  still  Grand'mere  and  I,  we  were  one, 
and  she  did  not  condemn  you.     But  what  a  loss  you  had  !" 

"Ay,  what  a  loss  !  But  for  my  father,  I  could  not  have 
formed  a  notion  of  my  mother,  and  your  Grand'mere  might 
have  been  mine  ;  and  see,  I  have  lost  her  also !" 

"  I  will  tell  you  about  her,  Monsieur  Caleb,"  volunteered 
Yolande  impulsively. 

"Will  you?  That  will  be  indeed  like  Grand'mere's 
child." 

"  Yes,  Grand'mere  would  have  made  it  all  up  to  you, 
uiiUefois.  She  would  have  rejoiced  to  render  you  rich 
with  her  best  blessing,  which,  when  you  knew  no  better, 
for  a  little  moment  you  despised — and  she  is  gone,  like  the 
good  squire  your  father !" 

"Like  my  father,"  repeated  Caleb,  "who  thought  to 
make  you  his  daughter,  and  died  smiling  in  the  thought." 

"  And  he  left  you  alone  with  what  remains  of  his  good 
people  at  the  Mall,"  Yolande  interposed,  restlessly,  but 
wistfully. 

"Because  you  will  not  come  to  me, Yolande." 

"  I  will  come — I  will  come !"  yielded  Yolande  sudden- 
ly, weeping  in  generous  abandonment.  "  I  have  been  un- 
like Grand'mere — what  she  would  not  have  had  me  to  be. 
I  have  forgotten  you.  "What  could  hold  me  back  from 
you  ?" 


i  ii  i:    EXD, 


Mr.  Motley,  the  American  historian  of  the  United  Netherlands— we  owe  him 
English  homage. — London  Times. 

"As  interesting  as  a  romance,  and  as  reliable  as  a  jiroposition  of  Euclid.'''' 


History  of 

The  United  Netherlands. 

FEOM    THE    DEATH    OF    WILLIA-M    THE    SILENT    TO    THE    TWELVE    YEAES'   TBUCE. 

WITH  A  FULL  VIEW  OF  THE  ENGLISH-DUTCH  6TEUGGLE  AGAINST 

SPAIN,   AND  OF  THE   ORIGIN  AND   DESTRUCTION 

OF     THE     SPANISH     AEilADA. 

By  JOHN  LOTHROP  MOTLEY,  LL.D.,  D.C.L., 

Corresponding  Member  of  the  Institute  of  France,  Author  of  "The  Rise  of  the 

Dutch  Republic." 

With  Portraits  and  Map. 

4  vols.  Svo,  Muslin,  $14  00. 

Critical  Notices. 

His  living  and  truthful  picture  of  events.— Quarterly  Review  (London),  Jan., 
1861. 

Fertile  as  the  present  ag^  has  been  in  historical  works  of  the  highest  merit 
none  of  them  can  be  ranked  above  these  volumes  in  the  grand  qnalities  of  inu  n  st, 
accuracy,  and  truth. — Edinburgh  Quarterly  Review,  Jan.,  1861. 

This  noble  work — Westminster  Review  (London). 

One  of  the  most  fascinating  a3  well  as  important  histories  of  the  century Cor. 

y.  Y.  Evening  Post 

The  careful' study  of  these  volumes  will  infallibly  afford  a  feast  both  rich  and 
rare. — lialtirnore  Republican. 

Already  takes  a  rank  among  standard  works  of  history. — London  Critic. 

Mr.  Motley's  prose  epic — London  Spectator. 

Its  pages  are  pregnant  with  instruction.— London  Literary  Gazette. 

We  may  profit  by  almost  ivory  page  of  his  narrative.  All  the  topics  which  ngi. 
tate  us  now  are  more  or  less  vividly  presented  in  the  History  of  the  United  Nether- 
lands.— New  York  Times. 

Bears  on  eveiy  page  marks  of  the  same  vigorous  mind  that  produced  "The  Rise 
of  the  Dutch  Republic;"  but  the  new  work  is  riper,  mellower,  and  though  equally 
racy  of  the  soil,  softer  flavored.  The  inspiring  idea  which  breathes  through  Mr. 
Motley's  histories  and  colors  the  whole  t'  xture  of  his  narrative,  is  the  grandeur  of 
that  memorable  struggle  in  the  16th  century  by  which  the  human  mind  broke  the 
thraldom  of  religious  intolerance  and  achieved  its  independence The  World,  -V.  )'. 

The  name  of  Motley  now  stands  in  the  very  front  rank  of  living  historians.  His 
Dutch  Republic  took  the  world  by  surprise ;  but  the  favorable  verdict  then  given 
is  now  only  the  more  deliberately  confirmed  on  the  publication  uf  the  continued 
Btory  under  the  title  of  the  Eistoryof  the  United  Netherlands.  All  the  nerve, 
and  power,  and  substance  of  juicy  life  are  there,  lending  a  charm  to  every  page. — 
Church  Journal,  N.  Y. 

Motley,  indeed,  has  produced  a  prose  opio.  and  his  fighting  scenes  are  as  real, 
spirited,  and  life-liki  mbats  in  the  Iliad The  Press  (Phila.). 

His  history  i-  as  interesting  a*  a  romance  and  as  reliable  as  a  proposition  of 
did.     Clio  never  had  a  more  faithful  disciple.     We  advise  every  reader  whose 
means  will  permit  to  become  the  owner  ol  iringhim 

that  he  will  never  r,  grot  the  investment Christian  Intelligencer,  S.  Y. 

Published  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS, 

Franklin  Square,  New  York. 

W  Harper  S.-  I?n<vrnrr.s  will  nil  th  i  Above  Wi  rk  by  Mail,  p^tftire  pro. pail 
[for  any  distance  in  the  United  States  under  8000  mil  fi       M  n  y. 


•  Tney  do  honor  to  American  Literature,  and  would  do 

honor  to  the  Literature  of  any  Country  in  the  World." 

THE   RISE   OF 

THE    DUTCH    REPUBLIC. 

By  JOHN  LOTHROP  MOTLEY. 

New  Edition.    With  a  Portrait  of  "William  of  Orange.    3  vols. 
8vo,  Muslin,  $10  50. 

We  regard  tliis  work  as  the  best  contribution  to  modem  history  that  has  yet 
been  made  by  an  American.—  Methodist  Quarterly  Review. 

The  "History,  of  the  Dutch  Republic"  is  a  great  gift  to  us;  but  the  heart  and 
earnestness  that  heat  through  all  its  pages  are  greater,  for  they  give  us  most 
timely  inspiration  to  vindicate  the  true  ideas  of  our  country,  and  to  compose  an 
able  history  of  our  own.— Christian  Examiner  (Boston). 

This  work  bears  on  its  face  the  evidences  of  scholarship  and  research.  Tha 
arrangement  is  clear  and  effective;  the  style  energetic,  lively,  and  often  brilliant 

•  *  *  Mr.  Motley's  instructive  volumes  will,  we  trust,  have  a  circulation  commen- 
surate with  their  interest  and  value.—  Protestant  Episcopal  Quarterly  Review. 

To  the  illustration  of  this  most  interesting  period  Mr.  Motley  has  brought  the 
matured  powers  of  a  vigorous  and  brilliant  mind,  and  the  abundant  fruits  of  pa- 
tient and  judicious  study  and  deep  reflection.  The  result  is,  one  of  the  most 
important  contributions  to  historical  literature  that  have  been  made  in  this  coun- 
try.— North  American  Review. 

We  would  conclude  this  notice  by  earnestly  recommending  our  readers  to  pro- 
cure for  themselves  this  truly  great  and  admirable  work,  by  the  production  of 
which  the  auther  has  conferred  no  less  honor  upon  his  country  than  he  has  won 
praise  and  fame  for  himself,  and  than  which,  we  can  assure  them,  they  can  find 
nothing  more  attractive  or  interesting  within  the  compass  of  modern  literature. 
— Evangelical  Review. 

It  is  not  often  that  we  have  the  pleasure  of  commending  to  the  attention  of  the 
lover  of  books  a  work  of  such  extraordinary  aud  unexceptionable  excellence  as 
this  one. — Universalist  Quarterly  Review. 

There  are  an  elevation  and  a  classic  polish  in  these  volumes,  and  a  felicity  of 
grouping  and  of  portraiture,  which  invest  Ihe  subject  with  the  attractions  of  a 
living  and  stirring  episode  in  the  grand  historic  drama.— Southern  Methodist 
Quarterly  Review. 

The  author  writes  with  a  genial  glow  and  love  of  his  subject. — Presbyterian 
Quarterly  Review. 

Mr.  Motley  is  a  sturdy  Republican  and  a  hearty  Protestant.  IPs  style  is  live- 
ly and  picturesque,  and  his  work  is  an  honor  and  an  important  accession  to  our 
national  literature. — Church  Review. 

Mr.  Motley's  work  is  an  important  one,  the  result  of  profound  research,  sincere; 
convictions,  sound  principles,  and  manly  sentiments;  and  even  those  who  are 
most  familiar  with  the  history  of  the  period  will  find  in  it  a  fresh  and  vivid  ad- 
dition to  their  previous  knowledge.  It  does  honor  to  American  literature,  and 
T/ould  do  honor  to  the  literature  of  any  country  in  the  world. — Edinburgh  Re- 
view. 

A  serious  chasm  in  English  historical  literature  has  been  (by  this  book)  very 
remarkably  filled.  *  *  *  A  history  as  complete  as  industry  and  genius  can  make 
it  now  lies  before  us,  of  the  first  twenty  years  of  the  revolt  of  the  Tnited  Prov- 
inces. *  *  *  All  the  essentials  of  a  great  writer  Mr.  Motley  eminently  possesses. 
His  mind  is  broad,  his  industry  unwearied.  In  power  of  dramatic  description 
no  modern  historian,  except,  perhaps,  Mr.  Carlyle,  su  masses  him,  and  in  analy- 
•au  of  oliaractcr  lie  is  elaborate  and  distinct — Westminster  Review. 


t  MOTLEY'S    RISE    OF    THE    DUTCH    REPUBLIC 

It  is  a  work  of  real  historical  value,  the  result  of  accurate  criticism,  written 
in  a  liberal  spirit,  and  from  first  to  last  deeply  interesting. — Athenaeum. 

The  style  is  excellent,  clear,  vivid,  eloquent;  and  the  industry  with  which 
original  sources  have  been  investigated,  and  through  which  new  light  has  been 
6hed  over  perplexed  incidents  and  characters,  entitles  Mr.  Motley  to  a  high  rank 
in  the  literature  of  an  age  peculiarly  ricli  in  history. — North  British  Review. 

It  abounds  iir'new  information,  and,  as  a  first  work,  commands  a  very  cordial 
recognition,  not  merely  of  the  promise  it  gives,  but  of  the  extent  and  importance 
of  the  labor  actually  performed  on  it. — London  Examiner. 

Mr.  Motley's  "History"  is  a  work  of  which  any  country  might  be  proud. 

Press  (London). 

Mr.  Motley's  History  will  be  a  standard  book  of  reference  in  historical  litera- 
ture.— London  Literary  Gazette. 

Mr.  Motley  has  searched  the  whole  range  of  historical  documents  necessary  to 
the  composition  of  his  work. — London  Leader. 

This  is  really  a  great  work.  It  belongs  to  the  class  of  books  in  which  we 
range  our  Grotes,  Milmans,  Merivales,  and  Macaulays,  as  the  glories  of  English 
literature  in  the  department  of  history.  *  *  *  Mr.  Motley's  gifts  as  a  historical 
writer  are  among  the  highest  and  rarest. — Nonconformist  (London). 

Mr.  Motley's  volumes  will  well  repay  perusal.  *  *  *  For  his  learning,  his  liberal 
tone,  and  his  generous  enthusiasm,  we  heartily  commend  him,  and  bid  him  good 
6peed  for  the  remainer  of  his  interesting  and  heroic  narrative. — Saturday  Review. 

The  story  is  a  noble  one,  and  is  worthily  treated.  *  *  *  Mr.  Motley  has  had  the 
patience  to  unravel,  with  unfailing  perseverance,  the  thousand  intricate  plots  of 
the  adversaries  of  the  Prince  of  Orange;  but  the  details  and  the  literal  extracts 
which  he  has  derived  from  original  documents,  and  transferred  to  his  pages, 
give  a  truthful  color  and  a  picturesque  effect,  which  are  especially  charming. — 
London  Daily  News. 

M.  Lothrop  Motley  dans  son  magnifique  tableau  de  la  formation  de  notre  B&- 
publique. — G.  Geoen  Van  Pei>steeee. 

Our  accomplished  countryman,  Mr.  J.  Lothrop  Motley,  who,  during  the  last 
five  years,  for  the  better  prosecution  of  his  labors,  has  established  his  residence 
in  the  neighborhood  of  the  scenes  of  his  narrative.  No  one  acquainted  with  the 
fine  powers  of  mind  possessed  by  this  scholar,  and  the  earnestness  with  which  he 
has  devoted  himself  to  the  task,  can  doubt  that  he  will  do  full  justice  to  his  im- 
portant but  difficult  subject — W.  H.  Prescott. 

The  production  of  such  a  work  as  this  astonishes,  while  it  gratifies  the  pride 
of  the  American  reader. — N.  Y.  Observer. 

The  "Rise  of  the  Dutch  Republic"  at  once,  and  by  acclamation,  takes  its 
place  by  the  "  Decline  and  Fall  of  the  Roman  Empire,"  as  a  work  which,  wheth- 
er for  research,  substance,  or  style,  will  never  be  superseded. — N.  Y.  Albion. 

A  work  upon  which  all  who  read  the  English  language  may  congratulate 
themselves. — New  Yorker  LTandels  Zeitung. 

Mr.  Motley's  place  is  now  (alluding  to  this  book)  with  nallam  and  Lord  Ma- 
te, Alison  and  Macaulay  in  the  Old  Country,  and  with  Washington  Irving, 
Prescott,  and  Bancroft  in  this.  — N.  Y.  Times. 

The  authority,  in  the  English  tongue,  for  the  history  of  the  period  and  people 
to  which  it  refers. — N.  Y.  Courier  and  Enquirer. 

This  work  at  once  places  the  author  on  the  list  of  American  historians  which 
has  been  so  signally  illustrated  by  the  names  of  Irving,  Prescott,  Bancroft,  and 
Hildreth. — Boston  Times. 

The  work  is  a  noble  one,  and  a  most  desirable  acquisition  to  our  historical  lit- 
erature.— Mobile  Advertiser. 

Such  a  work  is  an  honor  to  its  author,  to  his  country,  and  to  the  age  in  which 
it  was  written. — Ohio  Farmer. 

Published  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS, 

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It  was  once  said  of  a  very  charming  and  high-minded  woman  that  to  know  her 
was  in  itself  a  liberal  education ;  and  we  are  inclined  to  set  an  almost  equally 
high  value  on  an  acquaintance  with  the  writings  of  "George  Eliot."  For  those 
who  read  them  aright  they  possess  the  faculty  of  educating  in  its  highest  sense, 
of  invigorating  the  intellect,  giving  a  healthy  tone  to  the  taste,  appealing  to  the 
nobler  feelings  of  the  heart,  training  its  impulses  aright,  and  awakening  or  de- 
veloping in  every  mind  the  consciousness  of  a  craving  for  something  higher  than 
the  pleasures  and  rewards  of  that  life  which  only  the  senses  realize,  the  belief  in 
a  destiny  of  a  nobler  nature  than  can  be  grasped  by  experience  or  demonstrated 
by  argument.  On  those  readers  who  are  able  to  appreciate  a  lofty  independence 
of  thought,  a  rare  nobility  of  feeling,  and  an  exquisite  sympathy  with  the  joys 
and  sorrows  of  human  nature,  "George  Eliot's"  writings  can  not  "fail  to  exert  an 
invigorating  and  purifying  influence,  the  good  effects  of  which  leaves  behind  it 
a  lasting  impression. — London  Review. 

"  George  Eliot,"  or  whoever  he  or  she  may  be,  has  a  wonderful  power  in  giv- 
ing an  air  of  intense  reality  to  whatever  scene  is  presented,  whatever  character 
is  portrayed. —  Worcester  Palladium. 

She  resembles  Shakspeare  in  her  power  of  delineation.  It  is  from  this  char- 
acteristic action  on  the  part  of  each  of  the  members  of  the  dramatis  persona-  that 
we  feel  not  only  an  interest,  even  and  consistent  throughout  but  also  an  admira- 
tion for  "George  Eliot"  above  all  other  writers. — PhilacU  Iphta  Evening  Telegraph. 

Few  women    -no  living  woman  indeed — have  so  much  strength  as  "George 

Eliot,"  and,  more  than  that,  she  never  allows  it  to  degenerate  into  coarseness. 

With  all  her  so-called  "masculine"  vigor,  she  has  a  feminine  tenderness,  which 

is  nowhere  shown  more  plainly  than  in  her  descriptions  of  children. — Bonton 

li/it. 

She  looks  out  upon  the  world  with  the  most  entire  enjovment  of  all  the  good 
that  there  is  in  it  to  enjoy,  and  with  an  enlarged  compass'ion  for  all  the  ill  that 
there  is  in  it  to  pity.  But  she  never  either  whimpers  over  the  sorrowful  lot  of 
man,  or  snarls  and  chuckles  over  his  follies  and  littlenesses  and  impotence.— 
Saturday  Review. 

Her  acquaintance  with  dilTerent  phases  of  outward  lifo,  and  the  power  of  an- 
alyzing feeling  and  the  working  of  the  mind,  are  alike  wonderful.— .Reader. 

"George  Eliot's"  novels  belong  to  the  enduring  literature  of  our  country — 
durable,  not  for  the  fashionableness  of  its  pattern,  but  for  the  texture  of  its  stiifl'. 
— Examin  >■. 


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Mr.  Carlyle  is  about  the  only  living  writer  whose  opinions  are 
of  value,  even  when  it  is  impossible  to  agree  with  them.  No  one 
is  more  fond  than  he  of  paradox,  but  few  men's  paradoxes  hint  at 
so  important  truths.  No  one  with  a  more  autocratic  dogmatism 
sets  up  strong  men  as  heroes,  or  condemns  the  hapless  possessors 
of  pot-bellies  to  infamy ;  but  then  his  judgments,  even  where  they 
can  not  be  confirmed,  always  enforce  some  weighty  principle  which 
we  were  in  danger  of  forgetting.  And  if  it  sometimes  happens 
that  neither  the  hero  nor  the  principles  commend  themselves,  still 
the  thoroughness  of  the  execution  and  the  fire  with  which  all  his 
writings  arc  instinct,  never  fail  to  make  a  great  work. — London  Re- 


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COMPLETION  OF  GROTE'S  HISTORY  OF  GREECE. 


A   HISTORY   OF    GREECE 


FROM  THE  EARLIEST  PERIOD  TO  THE  CLOSE  OF  THE  GENERA- 
TION CONTEMPORARY  WITH  ALEXANDER  THE  GREAT- 

BY  GEORGE  GROTE,  ESQ. 

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Muslin,  $18  00. 

It  is  not  often  that  a  work  of  such  magnitude  is  undertaken ;  more  seldom  still 
is  such  a  work  so  perseveringly  carried  on,  and  so  soon  and  yet  so  worthily  ac- 
complished. Mr.  Grote  has  illustrated  and  invested  with  an  entirely  new  signifi- 
cance a  portion  of  the  past  history  of  humanity,  which  he,  perhaps,  thinks  the  most 
splendid  that  has  been,  and  which  all  allow  to  have  been  very  splendid.  He  has  made 
great  Greeks  live  again  before  us,  and  has  enabled  us  to  realize  Greek  modes  of  think- 
ing. He  has  added  a  great  historical  work  to  the  language,  taking  its  place  with 
other  great  histories,  and  yet  not  like  any  of  them  in  the  special  combination  of 
merits  which  it  exhibits  :  scholarship  and  learning  such  as  we  have  been  ac- 
customed to  demand  only  in  Germans  ;  an  art  of  grouping  and  narration  different 
from  that  of  Hume,  different  from  that  of  Gibbon,  and  yet  producing  the  effect  of 
sustained  charm  and  pleasure  ;  a  peculiarly  keen  interest  in  events  of  the  political 
order,  and  a  wide  knowledge  of  the  business  of  politics  ;  and,  finally,  harmonizing 
all,  a  spirit  of  sober  philosophical  generalization  always  tending  to  view  facts 
collectively  in  their  speculative  bearing  as  well  as  to  record  them  individually. 
It  is  at  once  an  ample  and  detailed  narrative  of  the  history  of  Greece,  and  a  lucid 
philosophy  of  Grecian  history. —  London  Athenaeum,  March  8,  1856. 

Mr.  Grote  will  be  emphatically  the  historian  of  the  people  of  Greece. — Dublin 
University  Magazine. 

The  acute  intelligence,  the  discipline,  faculty  of  intellect,  and  the  excellent  eru- 
dition every  one  would  look  for  from  Mr.  Grote  ;  but  they  will  here  also  find  the 
element  which  harmonizes  these,  and  without  which,  on  such  a  theme,  an  orderly 
and  solid  work  could  not  have  been  written. — Examiner. 

A  work  second  to  that  of  Gibbon  alone  in  English  historical  literature.  Mr. 
Grote  gives  the  philosophy  as  well  as  the  facts  ot  history,  and  it  would  be  difficult 
to  find  an  author  combining  in  the  same  degree  the  accurate  learning  of  the  schol- 
ar with  tlie  experience  of  a  practical  statesman.  The  completion  of  this  great 
work  may  well  be  hailed  with  some  degree  of  national  pride  and  satisfaction. — 
Literary  Gazette,  March  8,  1856. 

The  better  acquainted  any  one  is  with  Grecian  history,  and  with  the  manner  in 
which  that  history  has  heretofore  been  written,  the  higher  will  be  his  estimation 
of  this  work.  Mr.  Grote's  familiarity  both  with  the  gnat  highways  and  the  ob- 
scurest by-paths  of  Grecian  literature  and  antiquity  has  seldom  been  equaled,  and 
not  often  approached,  in  unlearned  England  ;  while  those  Germans  who  have  ri- 
valed it  have  seldom  possessed  the  quality  which  eminently  characterizes  Mr. 
Grote,  of  keeping  historical  imagination  severely  under  the  restraints  of  evidence. 
The  great  charm  of  Mr.  Grote's  history  has  been  throughout  the  cordial  admira- 
tion he  feels  for  the  people  whose  acts  and  fortunes  he  has  to  relate.  *  *  We  bid 
Mr.  Grote  farewell  ;  heartily  congratulating  him  on  the  conclusion  of  a  work  which 
is  a  monument  of  English  learning,  of  English  clear-sightedness,  and  of  English 
love  of  freedom  and  the  characters  it  produces. — Spectator. 

Endeavor  to  become  acquainted  with  Mr.  Grote,  who  is  engaged  on  a  Greek 
History.  I  expect  a  great  deal  from  this  production. — Niebuhr,  the  Historian, 
t»  Professor  Lieber.. 

The  author  has  now  incontestably  won  for  himself  the  title,  not  merely  of  a 
historian,  but  of  the  historian  of  Greece.— Quarterly  Review. 

Mr.  Grote  is,  beyond  all  question,  the  historian  of  Greece,  unrivaled,  so  far  as 
we  know,  in  the  erudition  and  genius  with  which  he  has  revived  the  picture  of  a 
distant  past,  and  brought  home  every  part  and  feature  of  its  history  to  our  intel- 
lects  and  our  hearts.— London  Times. 

For  becoming  dignity  of  style,  unforced  adaptation  of  results  to  principles,  care- 
ful verification  of  theory  by  fact,  and  impregnation  of  fact  by  theory — for  extensive 
and  well-weighed  learning,  employed  with  intelligence  and  taste,  we  have  seen  no 
histoneal  work  of  modern  times  which  we  would  place  above  Mr.  Grote's  histo- 
ry.— Morning  Chronicle. 

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From  the  London  Examiner. 

That  tender  pathos,  which  could  sink  so  deep— that  gentle  humor,  which  could 
soar  so  lightly — that  delicate  perception,  which  nothing  could  escape — that  wide 
sympathy,  which  ranged  so  far — those  sweet  moralities,  which  rang  so  true :  it 
is  indeed  hard  and  sad  to  feel  that  these  must  be  silent  for  us  henceforth  forever. 

Let  us  be  grateful,  however,  that  we  have  still  those  writings  of  hers  which 
England  will  not  willingly  let  die,  and  that  she  has  given  us  no  less  an  example 
of  conscientious  work  and  careful  pains,  by  which  we  all  alike  may  profit.  For 
Mrs.  Gaskell  had  not  only  genius  of  a  high  order,  but  she  had  also  the  true  feel- 
ing of  the  artist,  that  grows  impatient  at  whatever  is  unfinished  or  imperfect. 
Whether  describing  with  touching  skill  the  charities  of  poor  to  poor,  or  painting', 
with  an  art  which  Miss  Austin  might  have  envied,  the  daily  round  of  common 
life,  or  merely  telling,  in  her  graphic  way,  some  wild  or  simple  tale :  whatever 
the  work,  she  did  it  with  all  her  power,  sparing  nothing,  scarcely  sparing  her- 
self enough,  if  only  the  work  were  well  and  completely  done. 

From  the  New  York  Evening  Post. 
It  is  said  that  George  Sand   remarked  to  an  English  friend :  "  Mrs.  Gaskell 
has  done  what  neither  I  nor  other  female  writers  in  France  can  accomplish— sho 
lia-<  written  novels  which  excite  the  deepest  interest  in  men  of  the  world,  and 
which  every  girl  will  be  the  better  for  reading." 


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[Mrs.   CRAIK.] 


These  novels  form  a  most  admirable  series  of  popular  fiction.  They  are  marked  by 
their  faithful  delineation  of  character,  their  naturalness  and  purity  of  sentiment,  the 
dramatic  interest  of  their  plots,  their  beauty  and  force  of  expression,  and  their  elevated 
moral  tone.  No  current  novels  can  be  more  highly  recommended  for  the  family  library, 
while  their  brilliancy  and  vivacity  will  make  them  welcome  to  every  reader  of  cultivated 
taste. 


TWO  MARRIAGES,   nmo,  Cloth,  ?i  50. 


A  NOBLE  LIFE,     izmo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 

CHRISTIAN'S       MISTAKE.        i2mo, 
Cloth,  £i  50. 


JOHN  HALIFAX,  GENTLEMAN. 
8vo,  Paper,  75  cents;  Library  Edition, 
i2mo,  Cloth,  £1  50. 


A  LIFE  FOR  A  LIFE.    Library  Edition, 
i2mo,  Cloth,  ?i  50  ;  8vo,  Paper,  50  cents. 


A  HERO,  AND  OTHER  TALES.  A 
Hero,  Bread  upon  the  Waters,  and  Alice 
Learmont.     i2mo,  Cloth,  $1  50. 


OLIVE.     8vo,  Paper,  50  cents. 


OUR  YEAR:  A  Child's  Book  in  Prose 
and  Verse.  Illustrated  by  Clarence 
Dobell.    i6mo,  Cloth,  Gilt  Edges,  $1  00. 


THE  FAIRY  BOOK.  The  Best  Popu- 
lar Fairy  Stories  selected  and  rendered 
anew.     Engravings.     i6mo,  Cloth,  Si  50. 


THE  HEAD  OF  THE  FAMILY. 
Paper,  75  cents. 


8vo, 


MISTRESS   AND   MAID.     A   House- 
Hold  Story.     8vo,  Paper,  50  cents. 


NOTHING  NEW.     Tales.     Svo,  Paper, 
50  cents. 

THE  OGILVIES.     8vo,  Paper,  50  cents. 


AGATHA'S   HUSBAND.     Svo,   Paper, 
50  cents. 

STUDIES  FROM  LIFE,     iimo,  Cloth, 
$1  25. 


AVILLION,    AND    OTHER    TALES. 
8vo,  Paper,  $1  25. 


Published  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS,  New  York. 


CJT"  Sent  by  Mail,  postage  free,  to  any  part  of  the  United  Statss,  on  receipt  of  the  price. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
Los  Angeles 

This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


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